A hands-on proper security solution!
March 14, 2018
A hands-on proper security solution!
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with AlienVault OSSIM
AlienVault OSSIM is used in the organization as a log centralization tool and also as an event manager. We also use the feature of asset and availability management. The Netflow feature is also really helpful at diagnosing spikes of activity in the network, we also rely on it to detect suspicious activity.
- Most of the configuration comes out-of-the-box suited for most environments. Setting it up is really easy, with the wizard, you can have it working in less than 3 hours of deployment, without counting asset installation.
- Out-of-the-box dashboards are really useful. You can modify or add new widgets to suit your needs, but you'll most likely agree with what already comes configured.
- The tickets feature for handling alarms is really easy to use.
- The correlation directives that come out of the box are very few. I understand more correlation directives are a premium product, but one can hardly see the value of having very few. It makes new customers think they will not get better directives when they switch to the full USM or USM Anywhere.
- Same with reports, the few reports it comes out of the box can be retrieved using other tools that are better prepared for the task. I understand that compliance reports aren't free, but at least I'd expect more security reports.
- The OTX tab in dashboards sometimes takes too long to load, even if you have a fast internet and plenty of resources in the VM.
- Since it's free, ROI has been positive in terms of money. In time cost and engineer time, it has been also very cheap to implement since it's very easy to get it running.
- As a learning tool, for ACSE certification, it has also been very useful, since it shares a lot with the USM appliance installation.
- As a test environment, again, it shares a lot with the USM appliance installation, so if you have a USM also and you don't want to test things over your production environment, testing with OSSIM first has been a good way to mitigate possible bad effects.
AlienVault OSSIM as the first experience with a SIEM is very fine, especially if your company is an SMB. Every SIEM shares some features in common with other products, features such as log retrieval and normalization. So if you stick with principles, you can learn other SIEM products as well. If your environment is not of a minimum size, LogRhythm might be overkill for your network, same with McAfee Enterprise Security Manager.