Arcsight by OpenText vs. Security Onion vs. Splunk Enterprise

In the current lot of hundreds of SIEM solutions out there in the market, ArcSight ESM is fairly less expensive with strong fundamentals in place. The log ingestion, correlation are very well performing and totally worth ROI. However, the tool has lost its way when it comes to staying abreast with current feature curve of SIEM technology and the evolution has not been done by MicroFocus. Search times are high and there is no major plug-in that has been introduced as part of the product life cycle.

Incentivized

Security Onion works well for setting up within a Linux environment. This brings a new platform to run and maintain though. The application its self has helped to keep track of logs and vulnerabilities in the environment. Alert triage and case creation is simple to start and follow through to the end.

It's well suited for what I do, which is network security operations. And that's for anything from troubleshooting incidents, troubleshooting performance, troubleshooting for the purpose of a compliance and auditing. It's not best suited for users who are new in terms of they're new to the product and they have expectations that probably Splunk cannot meet.

Incentivized

• Integration with smart logger and ESM to create rules and easy management of the same.
• Easy integration with all end point security management tool(IPS/IDS, Firewall, Anti-Virus) and their consolidated output at a single place to effectively rectifying true and false positives.

Incentivized

• GUI
• Support
• Easy of use

• It is very useful in creating custom rules for analyzing system logs and display relevant information. The query language is very easy to learn.
• We can create custom UI to visualize the output of our data. The interface is very flexible. It also allows the sharing of rules among users.
• There is an open online community to help others. Stackoverflow also has a splunk community. These resources make it more convenient to learn.

Incentivized

• It is slow comparing to any other SIEM Tool.
• We have to create filter for each alerts need some custom filter .
• Here we dont have any single tab for see all the alerts .also need some attractive features for dashboard.

Incentivized

• Requires Linux
• Training

• Splunk light limits number of users to 5. Wish there was a flexible license, where one could add more users.
• Splunk light does not let you add > few realtime alerts. Wish there was a flexible license, where one could add as many realtime alerts as wanted.
• Better insight into daily ingestion values

Incentivized

We are using Splunk extensively in our projects and we have recently upgraded to Splunk version 6.0 which is quite efficient and giving expected results. We keep track of updates and new features Splunk introduces periodically and try to introduce those features in our day to day activities for improvement in our reporting system and other tasks.

Overall, it is a good investment in order for an organization to stay compliant and stay secure from all the wild things happening. It is definitely a cost effective tool with some good features including correlation, log storage, reporting and dashboards. If a customer is looking for advanced set of features, then I would highly not recommend this.

Incentivized

You can literally throw in a single word into Splunk and it will pull back all instances of that word across all of your logs for the time span you select (provided you have permission to see that data). We have several users who have taken a few of the free courses from Splunk that are able to pull data out of it everyday with little help at all.

Incentivized

When properly setup and configured, Splunk is extremely reliable.

Incentivized

I personally haven't reached the support team, however, the engineers never complained about the Arcsight support team. We had some issues with the tool in the past but every time we reached the support, all issues were resolved in a timely manner.

Incentivized

Splunk maintains a well resourced support system that has been consistent since we purchased the product. They help out in a timely manner and provide expert level information as needed. We typically open cases online and communicate when possible via e-mail and are able to resolve most issues with that method.

Incentivized

The online course was simple clear and described the main capabilities of the solution. There is also an initial module that can be done for free so anyone can familiarize themselves with the functionality of this solution. On the other hand, however, there could be more free online courses. Maybe even with a certificate, this would broaden the group of people who are familiar with the platform while increasing familiarity with the solution itself.

Smooth without too many major issues.

Incentivized

Multiple platforms are already supported by Arcsight. Support is good. Scripts can be used to get data from multiple threat intel sources & the same can be used in correlation rules to detect any suspicious activity. Reporting features are good & you can check any backdated information within new clicks.

Incentivized

Other vendors may have a more robust solution but for our needs, Security Onion was the one to move forward with. We have tested some of the others but the cost of those platforms makes the ROI not as desirable. There is a learning curve with Security Onion but it is worth it for the value provided.

I didn't get to fully evaluate Logstash as our corporation was already using Logstash, but both seemed like viable solutions to the problem that we were having. I wanted to evaluate Logstash some more, both did seem like they would work for the business needs that we had, we went with splunk as many teams were already using it.

Incentivized

Splunk can scale in to the petabyte per day range which of course is awesome

• Logger helps us to decrease incident response times.
• It also decreased our project times with the man/day calculations. Before this solution, it may take up to 10 men/days to do something. After this, it becomes nearly half of the time.

Incentivized

• Makes Alert Triage easier to handle
• Analysis of threats simple

• I don't have any numbers to share but Splunk has positively served as a 24/7 monitoring tool that has saved hours of work by self-detecting, saving statistics and alerting problems in the system or from external interfaces as soon as they happen.
• Splunk dashboards does a solid job in collecting, analyzing data and creating reports that contain an entire day's activity and then automatically sent out to the business.
• Splunk is very easy to learn and very useful to any program or business application.

Incentivized