In the current lot of hundreds of SIEM solutions out there in the market, ArcSight ESM is fairly less expensive with strong fundamentals in place. The log ingestion, correlation are very well performing and totally worth ROI. However, the tool has lost its way when it comes to staying abreast with current feature curve of SIEM technology and the evolution has not been done by MicroFocus. Search times are high and there is no major plug-in that has been introduced as part of the product life cycle.
Overall, it is a good investment in order for an organization to stay compliant and stay secure from all the wild things happening. It is definitely a cost effective tool with some good features including correlation, log storage, reporting and dashboards. If a customer is looking for advanced set of features, then I would highly not recommend this.
If you go for platinum support, it's good as you have priority for support. They will take remote control of your machines and troubleshoot. Also, they arrange requirement SEM depending on the issue.
We are currently using Elastic search as well for better management of our devices and to keep all the loopholes filled that have been created around the non-upgraded version of Arcsight Enterprise Manager. Elastic searches have the latest mechanism to fetch logs and correlated data, as well as process them in a more useful way.