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AlienVault in the College Classroom, from Vendor to Employer
Updated April 01, 2017

AlienVault in the College Classroom, from Vendor to Employer

Philip D | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

USM Appliance (On-Premises)

Overall Satisfaction with AlienVault USM

AlientVault is used in the classroom in a college environment to acclimate students to the product before they go out in the field and use it in a production environment. We have several students in our Baccalaureate program that are using the product in their current jobs. Some students are going on internship positions where the company is using AlienVault as a main product in an NOC environment. Currently, AlienVault is a dashboard utility in our classroom where students can see the product, get excited about the product, use the product, and gain knowledge of the product without fear of breaking something in a production environment. This hands-on approach is a win-win situation for Pittsburgh Technical College and future employers.
  • Dashboards.
  • Using trends in industry such as OTX pulses.
  • The alarms are easy to track and start an investigation.
  • More graphs like PRTG.
  • More hands on labs.
  • A faster learning curve.
We are looking at IBM Qradar and PRTG by Paessler since we are academic partners with both IBM and Paessler. Since AlienVault is a bundle of multiple tools which is used in the forensic track it is nice to see them in a bundled product where the tools are used in the background rather than knowing first-hand knowledge on how to use the tool.
The college is relatively new to the product, so students are learning as well as instructors to see what the product can do. Our board of advisers for Information Technology and Security Forensics were pleased that we were using AlienVault in the classroom environment. They were willing to show the full potential of AlienVault.

Using AlienVault USM

300 - Students use AlienVault to become acclimated to how the USM product works. There has been a great deal of knowledge learned by troubleshooting false positives. There are many tools that can be used to analyze how an alarm incident is injected and where or not it was a true concern. Recently we were seeing worms reporting on the probe. Some students ran some initial scans on the probe device to determine if the worm actually existed.