QRadar is very well suited on environments where there are not multiple tenants or domains, we do have success on this kind of scenario. IBM Security QRadar SIEM is less appropriate for environments with multiple tenants, specially when each tenant represent a different End Costumer (such as for MSSP companies), those environments require a high amount of rules and building blocks replications, since each tenant will have its own "BB definitions", servers, rules exception, etc. Also, some information, such as EPS count or EPS dropped are generated by QRadar's own log sources, which takes place on default domain, therefore users associated with different domain can not have access to those logs, even when the information is related to other domain's environment. For example, even if Event Collector 1 is associated to Domain A, the log informing its dropped EPS is generated by System notification, log source that must be associated to Default domain.
AlienVault Unified Security Management (USM) Anywhere is a cloud-based security information and event management solution that provides effective and affordable threat detection, incident response, and compliance management capabilities. USM Anywhere is well suited to mid-size enterprise environments operating in the cloud. USM Anywhere is also well suited to enterprises whose operations teams require easy deployment and management. Last, USM Anywhere is considered a highly affordable option compared to competitors. USM Anywhere lags competitors in several areas, such as application monitoring, database monitoring, and integrations with third-party solutions such as cloud access security brokers (CASB), DAM, DAP, and DLP.
The USM platform provides the essential security capabilities that work together for a fast and cost-effective way for organizations to have complete visibility into the security of their environment.
With the information gathered during asset discovery, USM will correlated that information with known vulnerabilities for continuous vulnerability awareness. In addition, USM contains an active scanner capable of scanning for over 30,000 known vulnerabilities.
To give better visibility into your network, and possibly detect intrusions that don’t follow behavioral patterns, we offer Netflow information, bandwidth monitoring, and traffic capture, all part of our behavioral monitoring capabilities built into USM.
Need to spend more time configuring the system to properly interpret and normalize different type of data collected from multiple resources.
While Rule creation QRadar uses that rules to detect security threats and generate alerts, but to creating and managing rules is bit complex & tedious work to complete.
IBM Security QRadar SIEM is excellent in handling large & complex systems that requires in-depth knowledge and extensive training to configure and maintain the system which includes upgrading, optimization of performance & issue troubleshooting.
USM Anywhere doesn't allow you to multi-home sensors. So if you have non-routable networks, you'll need to investigate the on-premise solution too.
You have to be on top of tuning else a constant stream of alerts will cause your SOC staff to begin ignoring alarms.
You have to be on top of tuning else you'll eat your allotment of storage for that month. It is really easy to exceed your storage quota if you don't proactively monitor log sources. USM could do a better job letting you know if a log source is too chatty.
With the arrival of IBM Security QRadar SIEM at our company, we have a better vision of all the security needs that may arise, it is a very safe software to use that prevents threats from damaging our IT environment, it is impossible to change it for another software.
The centralized logging and retention for PCI compliance was our main driver, and it is meeting that need. Otherwise there has been enough frustration with the lack of documentation and the need to customize through the CLI that I would be open to alternatives.
As a grade I give 8 as QRadar is not easy to learn. It requires some time to master it. It also needs a team of people actively working on the product. Once you learn to use it the software works very well and it is easy to correlate and understand detected threats. It only takes time to learn how to use it well and configure it properly.
Once you are able to navigate the different panels, finding what you need is quite easily. Before getting used it it can be a bit of challenge . Each panel is quite well laid out and the filtering search capabilities are quite strong.
We do have issues with maintenance on the AlienVault USM as the disk fills up from time to time with other data sources. Sources for scanning logs and net flow data isn't calculated in regular disk maintenance and can easily fill up our disk if we do not keep an eye on it with some custom Nagios plugins. The system does properly trim logging data from logging sources properly.
With the latest release of AlienVault USM overall performance has not been an issue. We have noticed single source events per second does not scale well with the overall system. 2,000eps on a vmware system with a single source produces delays of up to an hour for us. Pages, reporting and even raw log searches are rather quick though.
Customer support is Good of IBM, While Using IBM QRadar its deployment is to slow and suddenly stop working and crashed we have contacted IBM Support and Rised a Ticket within a few minute we get call back from customer support and Query Resolved by them Fast And Rapid Support of Ibm
Support is friendly but response time has been spotty. Also initially when we signed up there was a lot of pointing us at the documentation, which has been spotty and ad-hoc for what is supposed to be a commercial product. Overall the feel of AlienVault and the support has been of a very new and startup company that is trying to grow up out of it's open source roots, and I'm not sure if they've totally been able to make the transition to being able to meet the expectations of the enterprise customers.
The training was very useful and the people who taught us were very knowledgeable. Although the software may initially seem difficult to learn they made things much easier for us.
I did not have any experience with "in person" training directly. The free online classes offered for a half a day are based on the actual training offered. These little teasers are very good and well worth your time to learn a few quick and dirty ways of getting more information from your SIEM
The training was very useful and the people who taught us were very knowledgeable. Although the software may initially seem difficult to learn they made things much easier for us.
The instructor gave detailed overview and went through the labs before allowing us to attempt using them. I enjoyed the balance of time and level of instruction received. The content went deeper that usual and the lab environment was easy to use and all results were consistent. I came away from the course knowing more than i did if I had just read the course notes.
Initial patience is required to learn how to use the product, and it takes a dedicated team to use it. One person is not enough, and it's not enough to just set it up and check it once in a while. It has to be used daily and kept under control to be used effectively
AlienVault USM was a very simple to implement and get up and running. We started with a trial version and had that up and going within an hour of receiving email instructions from the sales engineer. We never had to contact support to get the system up and going. It was extremely easy to convert over to a full license once we started with a paid version.
I would always recommend Splunk over IBM Security QRadar SIEM unless you're trying to save money or only onboarding and normalizing well known data sources. IBM Security QRadar SIEM doesn't seem to handle RBA and complicated, chaining correlation rules very effectively and if I had to write a custom add-on for custom data, I found it easier to do so in Splunk.
The cost of AlienVault is what sold us on AlienVault. However, considering the amount of time and effort that has gone into getting it set up and realizing that views and reports cannot be shared across groups makes it not worth the savings.
The AlienVault USM is not very scalable. Some scalability can be achieved by installing additional sensors, but this only offers 500eps per sensor and is still overall limited by the installation type of VM or physical. We have also noticed the EPS (events per second) is rated overall and not towards a single source. A single source on a very healthy VMware partition tops out at 2,000eps for us, no matter how we configure it. Maybe this is a problem of the 5.2 release?
Once you hit the 150 asset mark, you have to jump to their unlimited license. There is no middle ground. We were only 10 or so assets above the 150 so we had to chose to either not monitor those assets or pay the price of the upgrade.
AlienVault brings all the information to one place which makes it much quicker to track down problems.
