AlienVault OSSIM (discontinued) vs. Splunk Enterprise Security

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

Well-Suited Scenarios:

Real-Time Threat Response: ES excels in swiftly detecting and responding to security threats through data correlation.

Compliance Management: ES streamlines compliance with detailed logs and reports, ideal for regulated industries.

User Behavior Analytics: Effective in monitoring user and entity behavior, particularly for insider threat detection.

Large-Scale Environments: Valuable for organizations with diverse data sources and high volumes of data.

Incident Investigation: ES aids in post-incident analysis, reconstructing events to understand root causes.

Less Appropriate Scenarios:

Smaller Organizations: For simpler setups, ES may be complex and costly.

Static Environments: In low-risk settings, ES's advanced features may be unnecessary.

Limited Resources: Tight budgets or sparse IT resources may hinder effective ES use.

Lack of In-House Expertise: Without security experts, optimizing ES can be challenging.

Budget Constraints: ES may be cost-prohibitive for budget-conscious organizations, prompting consideration of more affordable alternatives.

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

• Its best feature is its user interface, which is easy to navigate and understand. All you need is a little tutorial on how to use the Splunk query language and you're done.
• Logs can be easily uploaded or shared across multiple platforms and display a highly insightful graphical representations of data using graphs, tables, and many other formats.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• To identify User Behaviour analysis is lacking component which we get in Splunk UBA.
• The documentation part is hard to work on because if the new user tries to learn ES then the documentation is not user-friendly.
• ES must ass more Knowledge objects by default to make security-related aspects more reliable and enhance the details.

Incentivized

We are very happy with Splunk and would advise anyone to take a serious look at it. It might look pricey but the rewards Splunk offers seem endless.

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

You definitely need to learn how to use Splunk to get the most of the tool. There are many courses available for free to get up to speed on the usability of the tool but it's not that simple. It will take time to digest all the data and to understand how to query for what you are looking for.

Incentivized

I'm not an ES user, but, in my implementation I usually try to prevent all service stops to guarantee High availability to the final customers.

Incentivized

ES requires a very performant infrastructure: if it has it's performant, otherwise not. I had situation with a very performant infrastructure and I didn't notized that it was a distributed architecture, it seemed that there ware few data on my PC, othewise I experienced less performant infrastructures with less performaces.

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

It's good when it's responsive, but I've had times where I had to wait quite a while for a response. But these are typically the exceptions rather than the rule. When you do get a response it is always well-informed and appropriate. I would say they've been trending better over time with this.

Incentivized

I experienced only on-line training, but the trainers were very professional and competent. Maybe it could be more useful if they also have an experience in projects because sometimes they didn't have a real project experience to communicate to the students. Anyway, it was very interesting and I learned many thing that's very difficoult (or maybe impossible!) to have by myself, aven if I have more than 10 years of Splunk activity experience.

Incentivized

It was very interesting and I learned many thing that's very difficoult (or maybe impossible!) to have by myself. The only problem was that, when I worked with the Splunk Professional Services, I found some difference between the training contents and the information from PS. In addition is required a long experience on Splunk Enterprise for the data ingestion part, in other words I'm able to work with ES because I'm worling on Splunk since 11 years, otherwise I'd some problem.

Incentivized

It's a fantatic product and it was very useful the presence of Splunk Professional Services for the Design Phase and the final Health Check.

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

LogRhythm is good for a team comprising mostly non-technical IT users. Unlike Splunk, it has a GUI log search and a good ticketing system. Splunk is better than Logrhythm for me as it provides me with the ultimate flexibility to write custom queries. Scalyr is a good tool and quite frankly lot faster than Splunk. However, I prefer Splunk because of its better Dashboards and panel customization abilities. Elastic is another amazing tool. It is hard to choose between the two especially because both have different sets of logs on them. I use both. Elastic for internal server logs, Splunk for everything else.

Incentivized

We have on prem splunk and it’s mostly east to setup, but we have issues keeping data separated between customer splunk deployments while at the same time only having to look at one SIEM to address events in every environment

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 have a 100% success rate on all our ES implementations due to the amazing documentation and Splunk enablement on the subject.
• Our Splunk ES business has grown 100% YoY for the last 3 years.
• In terms of long term management and maintenance, ES has been highly stable and predictable, reducing our overhead on costly services team for ad hoc maintenance work.