LevelBlue USM Anywhere vs. Splunk Cloud Platform

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.

Incentivized

I will highly recommend this software because using Splunk
Cloud has helped us become more proactive about handling our security concerns
and better manage our environment. It is one of the finest security software
that is easy to use and also provides analytics. It has excellent features like
creating dashboard security and managing features etc. So you must give it a try once!

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• With Splunk Cloud you get the advantage of moving from POC to Production in a matter of days rather than in months allowing the Business to gain a lot.
• Takes you away from managing infrastructure/administration, allows saving time & money. Reduce the overall TCO (Total Cost of Ownership)
• Move from Reactive to Proactive Monitoring
• Highly secure environment at your finger-tips

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Some of their more advanced features, like ITSI, Machine Learning, or Security Analytics, can be very challenging to setup and configure.
• Splunk Cloud support has been a challenge in the past. They are getting better, but they have had problems responding in a timely manner to issues.
• These are only some minor observations of things I have had to deal with. In general, Splunk is a solid product that is fantastic to use.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Ease of use and have all the features we need

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

What it does well:

- Powerful SPL query language for advanced users

- Excellent visualization dashboards

- Comprehensive documentation and community support

Where it needs work:

- Steep learning curve for SPL syntax

- Non-Intuitive UI for beginners

- Complex administration and data model configuration

- Search performance degrades with poor query optimization

Bottom line: Enterprise-grade tool requiring dedicated training investment. Best for teams with experienced analysts.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Splunk Cloud support is sorely lacking unfortunately. The portal where you submit tickets is not very good and is lacking polish. Tickets are left for days without any updates and when chased it is only sometimes you get a reply back. I get the feeling the support team are very understaffed and have far too much going on. From what I know, Splunk is aware of this and seem to be trying to remedy it.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Microsoft Dynamics is far more complex and far more costly to implement and configure in comparison to Splunk. It can be useful for integrations into existing Microsoft databases. Grafana is quick and easy to deploy and configure. However, it lacks the scale required for an enterprise of our size. It is great for smaller test cases.

Incentivized

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?

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Splunk Cloud has had a positive ROI in helping more efficiently track the cause of Help Desk Tickets.
• The billing model which is based on the amount of data from logs uploaded doesn't alert if a threshold is approaching. This can have a negative ROI.
• The training that I have taken while in-depth and focused is pretty expensive.

Incentivized