AlienVault OSSIM (discontinued) vs. LogRhythm NextGen SIEM Platform

The most obvious scenario in which OSSIM is well suited is in a single office/home office (SOHO) or small business, in which budget is reduced but asset discovery and vulnerability management are greatly needed and appreciated. OSSIM is lightweight and free, so the real challenge to face is to hire or assign an administrator to manage and operate it, instead of any investment on an expensive appliance. Also, as resellers, promoting usage of OSSIM to customers charging for professional services for installation, administration, and maintenance (remember that OSSIM doesn't have official support from AlienVault) is a great asset for the organization.

Incentivized

LogRhythm is good for providing a comprehensive view of the environment. It gives a great outline of whatever is going on in our servers and systems regarding security malfunctions. The SIEM sends real-time notifications when there are some occurrences; like creating a new user and inappropriate login attempts. It also avails a good use case that meets our HIPAA compliance.

Incentivized

• Threat analysis. It can correlate different events happening to detect a pattern or an attack.
• Dashboard provides a clean, single location to see what is going on in our environment.
• Up to date open threat exchange means everything new popping up out there is included and watched for in our environment.

Incentivized

• LogRhythm is a great SIEM to learn content on because the building blocks are very intuitive and easy to implement. All of the concepts relevant to content development are literally represented as drag and drop building blocks that can be easily manipulated.
• The statistical building blocks contain powerful anomaly detection capabilities that are extremely difficult to implement in other SIEMs or not possible at all.
• LogRhythm does better event classification than any other SIEM by far. My team typically drops all classification schemes from default installations of SIEMs and rebuilds them from scratch. I can actually use LogRhythms event classifications in rules without worrying about excessive partial matches or correlating unwanted events.

Incentivized

• Creating custom rules is a bit complicated
• Reporting could be improved
• Agent has caused conflicts with a couple of our other applications

Incentivized

• While searching for log events is quick, the interface isn't as user-friendly as other SIEM products.
• Many of the administrative/management functions are only available through the full LogRhythm desktop console, not through the web console.
• The LogRhythm agent, when used for FIM and RIM, is very memory intensive.

Incentivized

LogRhythm is focused on SIEM. That is their core business. Cost of operations, feature set and ease of use. The Log Rhythm support team is outstanding. Overall reliability is good. Reporting module needs some improvement and LR is promising that there will be significant improvements in future releases.

Incentivized

AlienVault OSSIM is far easy to use and manage - provided you know what you're doing. As any SIEM application, there is some background knowledge required in order to take advantage of the product's functionalities, such as the log correlation and analysis. Other than that, the application is quite usable and robust.

Incentivized

LogRhythm does a rather decent job of making the functionality advanced (allowing for advanced keyword & field searching, use of "AND" as well as "OR" statements in the search bar) while keeping it accessible (by not requiring a specific syntax to do quick searches). This combined with a user interface that has headings and labels that are intuitive is very helpful.

Incentivized

Everything is done through MSSP and installation pro services. Once those hours are burned up, then you're on your own without a lot of help. Typically the pro services hours aren't enough to get past 60 days and MSSP are hit and miss. We had a miss for installation helpers.

Incentivized

Support has always been fantastic for this product compared to many other support providers I've worked with. They are always very friendly and seem to be well trained and knowledgeable and never have to wait long for a solution. We usually get the issue fixed in the first call, but also we really haven't had to use support a ton so that's also a plus

Incentivized

• Buy professional services.
• Buy and implement the system if possible.
• Remember that the end point log configuration may require other teams in your company to assist you in getting the desired logs from all resources.
• Attend the end user and daily operations training after a period of usage so you are not overwhelmed with information on concepts not yet seen.
• Don't be afraid to call for help during your first months of use.
• Don't close any ticket until you are sure the expected results are verified.
• Use the community forums to discuss issues with your peers.
• Watch the training videos offered by L R University.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The only thing we chose LogRhythm NextGen SIEM Platform for is to allow the Security Analysts to work on the dashboards which don't know much about programming and query languages but has good intuition about cyber-security. It is easy to get hands-on compared to Splunk, which has an initial learning curve before being able to start harnessing its true power. Also, the ticketing system is quite fancy and somehow shows us the recent tickets that we need to jump on, which is not in Splunk.

Incentivized

• OSSIM and the installers didn't really help us optimize at installation. OSSIM went without optimization for almost two years before that fact was noticed. I think this decreased ROI.
• Finding and researching incidents is much faster with all data available. Sometimes too much data, though.

Incentivized

• We were able to retire a few older log collection platforms that we had in house. There were 2-3 systems doing the job of LogRhythm.
• We were able to bring some part of the analysis of events back in house and not rely on third party MSS.

Incentivized