AT&T AlienVault USM Reviews

General use cases would be for patch management and vulnerability management. The devices that are on the network may need patching if they're outdated. For any device or node that has entered the network and may be considered a threat, the HTTPS ports and different nodes need to be monitored for incoming and outgoing traffic. We could put in security rules for monitoring the actual devices down to the USP level, and we can also get the vulnerability information from OSX, and then provide that information to the IT teams.

In terms of the version, usually, when the updates come, the updates need to be aggregated to the customer, but at this moment in time, I am yet to secure a customer in that space due to the current COVID crisis in the country, across the Pacific, and globally.

In terms of deployment, the endpoints are on-premise, but it would be cloud-based in terms of the platform. So, it could be both depending on the customer. They would either have cloud or hybrid.

In terms of monitoring, my best feature would be the monitoring of components across the network. It monitors the respective nodes and any new node that comes onto the network and provides reports. The reporting dashboards are really helpful for management in terms of making decisions around patch management.

It is an all-in-one package. In terms of the selling points, to the best of my knowledge, it has eight different selling points or eight features, and they're all interlinked, which most of the infrastructure setups here do not have. They have separate systems for monitoring the networks. So, USM can cater based on those eight capabilities.

I've been using it just for my own personal upskilling in terms of how the product works. At the moment, it is pretty straightforward and simple, and it is working how it is supposed to. The feedback would come once it is deployed to customer sites. They'll be using it on a more frequent basis, and that's when the feedback would come in terms of the areas in which they're facing issues or are looking for simplicity.

I have been using this solution for the last eight to 10 months.

So far, I haven't seen any patches or updates from the partner or the OTX site to show any issues in terms of stability. Based on the frequency of the updates, at the moment, it seems stable.

It is easy to scale. It comes with all features, as opposed to separate individual modules. To my knowledge, you can scale it for your organization as and when there is a requirement or the organization grows. So, in terms of scalability, there is no problem. After you get it up and running, as the organization grows, the engines will be able to pick up that information.

It is really good for medium and large companies, but it can also be used for small organizations. Instead of deploying it to a small organization, you could provide a service where it is not on the customer site, and you basically link into your nodes for small customers. So, you install it for medium and large customers, and for small customers, you install it on your premise, and then you sell the individual features that they may request.

I have not been in touch with their technical support. I deal with the technical account manager. When I read up the information and there is something that I'm not sure about, I check my resources and see what's available online. If none of the available resources are helpful, I reach out to my account manager who then puts me in touch with the technical team. I presume that if we encounter any issues in deployment, it would be based on a customer's demography or the setup.

If you're not familiar with it from a tech perspective, it might be confusing for you, but from what I've seen and based on my experience, it is pretty simple and straightforward.

The user guides are also very helpful if you hit any roadblocks. It is very straightforward in terms of the instructions to set it up, but you should have minimum tech experience in understanding the documentation, which is fair enough and good because you don't want it to be too simple to set up that companies would say, "Well, we don't need IT if anybody can do this." So, you'd need some technical background to at least understand the documentation or the user guide.

I've only installed it for myself. It took a short amount of time to get it up and running. The deployment duration would depend on a customer's infrastructure size and the number of nodes that a customer has. It will also depend on the data collection that the agents or the engines need to do to protect the information and then put it in its database.

Its price is in the medium to upper range.

I would definitely recommend this solution, but I would also do a pre-assessment of the organizational setup and infrastructure. I'm a reseller, and it is obviously my top priority that we sell the product

If you look at the Gartner Magic Quadrants, you will see AlienVault is up there in the upper right quadrant, which makes it one of the top recommended solutions. That is the reason for my partnership with AT&T Cybersecurity for the product.

I would rate AT&T AlienVault USM a nine out of 10. No solution is 100% perfect.

We use it for compliance. We're not using it as a security operation center type of thing. Its usage is more from an auditing standpoint at this point.

We partner with them for customers who need something like a SIEM, so we're a cloud provider and integrator.

It is deployed on the cloud. It is a combination of AT&T's own cloud and our cloud. We run our own infrastructure. So, it is a hybrid and private cloud.

We're using it more for reporting, that's all. We're using it to help our customers to pass any kind of audits that they receive.

I don't have any suggestions for improvement. On our side, as a provider, we should develop a real security operation center type of practice, which we don't have right now.

There could be some type of integration with our existing portal. We have our own customer portals, and it would be good if there was an integration so that our portal can provide reports. There could be some type of API into the AlienVault system with the USM system so that it is easy to show the customers high-level reports of the system through our portal.

It is pretty stable from what I hear. 

It is cloud-based, so it is very scalable. It really depends on how many devices they have in their environment. Our customers are more mid-sized companies, so it fits what we need.

We don't have a lot of clients using this SIEM. Usually, a client is interested in something like this to help them with their auditing. So, we don't have a lot of customers using it right now. Probably in the near future, its usage will be increased in terms of the customers requesting it from a security standpoint.

It is pretty good. I usually don't contact their support. I usually contact their sales team. I work with their pre-sales and sales engineer and account rep.

It is pretty straightforward from what I've seen, but it has to be verified to make sure any changes in the environment are added to the configuration. Like anything, it is not set it and forget it. You really have to make sure that it is capturing everything if things change or new systems are brought online. It is more of a procedural thing where you have to make sure somebody is keeping it up to date.

For its maintenance, we have someone who manages the product itself. In our company, for IT people, we have around 100 or so staff. We have customers nationwide, but we probably have two to three people managing this product. They are in more of a security analyst type of role dedicated to security.

I don't know exactly, but I know it is based on the number of logs and the retention duration, such as 30 days or something like that. So, the smallest package is about 500 a month for 30 days of logs.

There is a virtual machine. You need resources for it. It is a log collecting VM. They provide the software, and you just have to load a virtual machine. So, you're going to incur some CPU RAM and storage for wherever this log collecting appliance is running, which typically is in our cloud and on our platform for the customer.

I would advise knowing your requirements and your data. What are you trying to protect or monitor? Before implementing something like this, you really should have basic security in place. You should have systems that are generating logs, for example, antivirus software and firewall. You have to have that all in place first to make this kind of product useful because this type of product is really meant to aggregate things after the fact. After you've put all the systems in place, then this system aggregates and collects everything together. You really need all the endpoint security, firewall security, and server security first, so you have meaningful data to look at. The SIEM is not going to be useful if you don't have any meaningful data for it to collect.

I still need to dig into it deeper to see exactly what it does. Our practice is kind of evolving, so this is probably something that we need to offer more to customers. We need to get more product knowledge on it and develop a practice around it. A lot of customers are asking for security operations center (SOC) services for remediation of problems. We don't do that right now, but that's something that I know is probably on the roadmap. With everything going on, that would be a helpful service to our customers, and I think they're asking for that. We've encountered customers asking for that type of service. We don't do it yet. I know there are other partners out there that do that, so really it's on our side to develop the product more. Whether it involves staying with this AT&T product or going for maybe another one, customers are looking for a little bit more. They are not just to have it set up, but also to have someone to act on any kind of alerts or any kind of potential breaches. They're looking for a service for somebody to actually remediate.

From what I know of the product, I would rate it an eight out of 10. 

The use case is for companies that want to have more visibility in their environment and want to apply governance. This solution is used for compliance management, vulnerability management, threat hunting, and threat protection.

I think all of the features are valuable. However, the most valuable feature is vulnerability management because it gives you insight into your environment to know what systems need to be updated or patched. You can avoid weaknesses in the computers and other systems by keeping them patched.

I think they need to broaden their compliance management to cover more areas of compliance. For example, they're very specific about HIPAA, CIS 8.0, and a few others, but they don't have a broad compliance management base. Some customers need compliance management with other standards or frameworks, which are unavailable on their platform. I want to see more compliance management capability because if they broadened it, it would be a much more attractive product. 

They have a lot of integrations, which is good, but the quality of integrations seems to be a little bit low. It's one thing to provide integration, and it's another to provide integration that works really well.

The solution is cloud-based and hybrid. A server is put into a customer's environment to collect information and send it to the cloud. Both the server installed in the customer's environment and the cloud solution are scalable. The solution has rapid elasticity and all the check marks a cloud-based solution needs to scale. It is definitely scalable.

There are currently 19 users in our company. I think over time we have plans to increase our usage of this solution, but as an MSP, we have clients with different requirements or needs, so we might pick a different solution because it's a better fit.  

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. It wasn't that difficult.

The initial steps of the implementation, getting the account and setting it up, only take a few hours. Then there's some fine-tuning that takes place afterward, and it takes a little bit longer. You need about a week to really get that fully configured with a good plan and deployed in the environment, and then from there, it's just fine-tuning as you go.

We handled the deployment in-house. The solution needs one person for deployment and one for management.

I don't recall exactly what their prices are, but they are a little more expensive than Microsoft. It really depends on what features in Microsoft you may already be using. If, for example, you're a company that has Microsoft's Defender for Endpoint and Defender for Identity, or basically any of their Defender Suite applications, you might already be paying a certain amount every month or every year for those features that the Microsoft Sentinel solution brings under one umbrella.

AlienVault also has additional fees for extra storage in the cloud. 

Recently, we were going to sell a customer AlienVault, but then they picked Microsoft Sentinel. We compared them because we wanted to make sure that  both solutions could do the same thing, and it turns out that Microsoft does it a little bit better.

It's like having a Swiss Army knife that has all of the tools you need to do a craft, or just having a regular pocketknife that you can only use to do one thing. In this case, AT&T is the pocketknife and Microsoft is the Swiss Army knife.

My advice would be to make sure the product is a good fit in terms of compliance and compatibility with your security solution, like your EDR and ATP solutions. Make sure that they play well together because you could have issues with the two fighting each other over protecting the computers.

I would rate this solution as a seven out of ten. 

It's a good product. They created AlienVault based off of an open source framework, so it's built on OSSIM. It's interesting that AT&T is going into the cybersecurity market since they're a huge mobile carrier. Right now, their marketing and advertisements are really good, but they need to invest more money into the product. If they focus more on building out the product, maybe invest a little bit more money into development, I think they'll have a stronger strategy and a very dominant winning solution in the market.

AlienVault USM is an SaaS solution offered through the cloud. It's a security incident event management solution that scans logs to look for various security patterns that are shipped to it. Then it alerts us so we can identify trends.

AlienVault gives us greater visibility into our security and tells us what we need to address. We haven't had any breaches, but if we were to have some, we would get alerts.

AlienVault's reporting is good. I like that vulnerability assessment is part of the solution, and the UI is intuitive. Also, the overhead is low, which is to say we don't need a dedicated SOC team to manage and analyze things constantly. We're a small company that doesn't have those resources.

I think plugin management should be self-service on AlienVault USM. The other product is self-service but on the USM side. You have to submit a ticket then AT&T creates and updates the plugins.

We often have application logs that are unique to us, so it's silly to have to open a ticket, have them do the work, and then release the plugin. It would be nice if they had a self-service portal where we could define the parameters within the product for the plugin and have a custom plugin for our logs. 

I've been using AlienVault USM for about two or three years.

AlienVault USM has been quite stable so far. We might've had one or two hiccups over the past couple of years, but nothing major.

We have had no issues with scalability at all. It's been seamless. We have only three or four users on our DevOps team, but we're getting information from all over. Of course, many downstream people benefit from the work that we do, but only about four people actually log in and use it. 

Technical support has been okay. It hasn't been great. On a scale of one to 10 scale, I'd say maybe a six. It took them a long time to respond to some of our questions, and we didn't get the complete responses we were expecting. In some cases, the process took so long that the question's urgency diminished by the time we could get to an answer.

Setting up AlienVault USM was relatively straightforward. Of course, all software is complex, but this wasn't overly complex. We did do some professional service hours with the vendor during the deployment, but that was more about best practices. We asked how to configure it to get the most out of the solution. 

It's not an admin-heavy product in terms of maintenance and management. There's certainly a lot you can do to customize and configure it, but it doesn't require much administration. Someone is logging in most days to check in and review alerts.

We looked at Splunk Enterprise with the added security module, and that worked great, but it also had a lot of overhead to get value out of it. We just didn't have the capacity for it.

I would give AlienVault USM a solid eight out of 10. There are certainly products out there that can do more. For a smaller company, I'd say it's a solid nine or a 10, but if we compare all the offerings on the market, I would say it's a solid eight. It doesn't have some of the features of the other ones, but it offers a lot of benefits to us because we can get the value that we need out of it without having a dedicated team.

It's been good overall, so I would give it a thumbs up. It's suitable for small organizations that don't have the capacity for a dedicated SOC that could handle something like Splunk Enterprise. Splunk is great for businesses with a dedicated team to do full-time analysis. But I think this is a nice solution for smaller companies where the IT staff has to wear multiple hats.

We use AT&T AlienVault USM as a managed SOC service for our customers to detect and respond to security events and potential incidents.

AT&T AlienVault USM has improved detection of the potential threats and helped us to proactively take action against these threats. AT&T USM has enabled us to identify the weaknesses and has helped in strengthening the weaknesses.

The ease of implementation is the most valuable feature.

The reporting and dashboards have room for improvement.

I have been using the solution for one year.

The solution is stable. I give the stability a nine out of ten. AT&T AlienVault USM has no uptime issues.

AT&T AlienVault USM is scalable and is based on the tiers offered. The tiers are from 250GB to 15 TB and more. This is the monthly log ingestion storage and is scalable to the next tier if more devices are added. This is a subscription model that supports 15 days, 30 days, and 90 days of online storage with little difference in pricing. The beauty of the solution is that they offer unlimited cold storage post the online storage duration. That can be retrieved within a day's time.

We have an account manager located in the UK who helps in getting the right technical person for emergencies. There is standard technical support through tickets. In general, they are pretty quick to respond and some of the enhancements are handled by their backend team for feature enrichment. 

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward. The configuration and deployment are easy.

The setup process initially requires a few hours. Once we have obtained the necessary licenses, we can start using the system within a day. However, it may take a few months to complete the heuristic data and begin the optimization process. One to two people are required for the deployment.

There is a trial license for 15 days and that acts as a POC. Post-trial period the same can be converted into a licensed tier.

We implement the solution for our customers.

When compared to other solutions such as Splunk, LogRhythm, and IBM Security QRadar, AT&T AlienVault USM is a reasonably priced option that is also relatively inexpensive. 

There are two criteria that I consider when evaluating products: "value for money" and "fit for purpose." The AT&T AlienVault USM satisfies both of these criteria. While we could potentially obtain better SIEM solutions by spending more, we must consider the cost. The SIEM is only one part of the overall model, and the efficiency of the response is also influenced by the people and processes behind it. Therefore, the tool alone cannot guarantee an efficient response. However, the AT&T AlienVault USM performs adequately in this regard, and I have not encountered any significant issues with it so far. Even with superior solutions such as Splunk, the effectiveness of the tool ultimately depends on the proficiency of the monitoring team. Therefore, I assign one-third of the overall value or a maximum of 40 percent to the tool's value if it accounts for 100 percent of the efficiency. In comparison to other products, the AT&T AlienVault USM is relatively good. On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten.

I would not recommend this solution for on-premises deployment or for large organizations due to the need for a well-designed architecture for implementation. However, I would recommend this solution for cloud deployment and for small to medium-sized organizations.

I used it in my previous company. My main use case was to identify the security events. Basically, it was a platform through which we used to monitor threat events for SOC operations.

We had its latest version. We used to keep updating it whenever there was a new release.

AlienVault was on-prem, and for cloud, we had Wazuh.

The feature that I liked the most is that they have a vulnerability assessment package that comes along with the SIEM solution. So, whenever I find any threat or alert for any of the devices or servers, I could immediately initiate a vulnerability assessment scan on that machine. That is one of a kind. The price at which AlienVault operates is also valuable.

The setup of AlienVault is extremely easy. It is very simple to understand for someone who is trying a SIEM solution for the first time.

The integration of servers and other devices is extremely easy. It is a piece of cake. You just double-click and start, and you are up and running. That's all.

Their threat intelligence platform needs to be broadened. They should integrate it with more threat intelligence platforms. For the threat feed that they get from open intelligence, I would like them to add a few premium threat intelligence platforms. They can provide a bundle in which AlienVault has the threat intelligence background of other premium products. 

I have been working with this solution for around nine years. I was using it in my previous company, and I stopped using it about four months ago when I moved to my current company.

It is very stable.

It is scalable. It was a large deployment. We had more than 1,000 employees, but it was only used by the information security team to monitor the security events and logs. We had 18 users, but we had integrated more than 250 servers and network devices with it.

They were absolutely helpful. I found everyone very knowledgeable, and the ideology and everything else was fantastic. I would rate them a five out of five.

Positive

From a security perspective, this was the first one, but before that, they had SolarWinds, which is not a security incident monitoring tool. It is just a network performance monitoring tool. After I joined the company, we had to get a SIEM solution, and we onboarded AlienVault at first. We used it for a few years, and after that, we also integrated Wazuh.

In my current company, we have Datadog. We are using ELK Stack, and we have built our own SIEM solution.

It was very simple. The deployment and integration of other devices took about three to five days, and just the installation took less than 30 minutes.

I did the setup for the company. I was heading information security for that company. 

It is affordable, and it also has many features that the premium products such as ArcSight and QRadar have. It is a very good platform for a SIEM solution. Everything is included in the price.

We have done a PoC in my current company, and I find both AlienVault and Datadog to be good, but we are exploring more options and doing a PoC with other solutions. We have not yet finalized any solution.

I would give it a good eight out of ten. 

We primarily use AlienVault for managing logs, IDS, and correlation, but we haven't used the other tools, which was a huge disappointment to me. 

Our main focus was intrusion detection, alerts, and correlation. It's easy to use AlienVault and integrate it with other alert tools because it includes lots of connectors. Either the tool is already there, or AlienVault will write an API for us if they don't have a connector for the solution that is providing the logs.

We've seen a lot of improvement in the product over the years. Their threat monitoring was an important feature for us, but we didn't use the tool to its full advantage. I wanted to use the built-in NES and asset management tools, but unfortunately we didn't use those because we had other solutions to address those areas.

I've been told that AlienVault doesn't have a full version of NES running in there, but I'm not sure if that's accurate or if my engineer made it that way. I'm not sure he was completely honest either because we had NES in the environment before. Those tools could be improved because AlienVault is a SIEM, and it added all these other features.

Are they proficient in every one of those areas? Are they proficient in asset management? Is their tool good enough to be your company's vulnerability scanner? Is it good enough to be your asset manager? Is it good enough to be those additional tools? That's where I don't know if we have enough information.

We've been using AlienVault for three years.

AlienVault is a highly stable tool. The sensors go down once or twice every few months, but it's generally a stable product. It ran for us for three years with very minimal issues or concerns.

We were a small organization of 250 people when we started with maybe 150 machines out there server-wise. We grew to about 1,500 employees through the acquisition of four or five different businesses, so it was effortless to scale.

You need to add more licenses and data for law collection. Other than that, it was easy to work with from that perspective, and the AlienVault salespeople are accommodating.

My engineer dealt with the techs before, but that wasn't often. When he did deal with them, they were knowledgeable and helpful.

Setting up AlienVault is straightforward. They provide teams and reps to help us get everything set up and connected. We also had a security engineer who was highly experienced in deploying the agents, putting the connectors in place, and pulling the logs into the SIEM.

AlienVault is certainly not nearly as expensive as Splunk or QRadar. It's decently priced, but I don't have the exact figure. 

This organization has AlienVault, and they're not happy with it, so I'm looking at other solutions. However, I don't know what their pain points were. I thought it was a great solution for my previous organization. It has tremendous benefits, and it brings everything into one single pane that includes your vulnerability management, asset management, IDS, logs, and correlation. It does all of those things in one single pane, and I think that's one of the benefits of AlienVault.

I rate AlienVault USM eight out of 10. That said, I haven't used many other SIEMs. I haven't worked with Splunk or QRadar. One of our organizations had QRadar, but they switched to AlienVault.

We have customers from the retail, industrial, strategic resource, and OT infrastructure sectors who are using AT&T AlienVault USM. The solution has several use cases.

I like that AT&T AlienVault USM is deployed on cloud, because the previous solution, the all-in-one solution wasn't, so we had a lot of problems with the all-in-one solution. Either the database was corrupted, or there was a large delay in the appliance. With AT&T AlienVault USM being on cloud, all of those problems disappeared.

Another feature I like about the solution is the ability to add apps. It's a really good feature.

AT&T AlienVault USM is a very intuitive tool, especially for analysts. It's easy to use.

An improvement for AT&T AlienVault USM is the option for us to build the connectors ourselves, for us to do the parsing ourselves, because those options disappeared with the version of the solution that we're currently using. I know I can talk to the vendor to ask for a new parsing option for the application, for any new platform, but I understand that it can take several months. Adding a parsing interface for the customers would be good.

AT&T AlienVault USM is a stable solution.

AT&T AlienVault USM is a scalable solution, especially because we have the option to use more sensors, and we have an average scale of log space for log rotation.

We don't deal with the support team for AT&T AlienVault USM, in terms of big issues, but in terms of them answering a question, or giving information about design specs, their response is good. Their response is correct, so we have no problem with the support for this solution.

From one to five, where one is bad and five is good, I'm rating their support a four.

The initial setup for AT&T AlienVault USM was easy.

We evaluated another product: AlienVault OSSIM, but only for testing, we did not suggest it to our customers.

We are using AT&T AlienVault USM. It's our main SIEM solution. We've been a partner of AT&T for four to five years. We still have a customer using the all-in-one solution, but now we are mainly promoting AlienVault USM Anywhere.

I know that the solution is undergoing changes to become even more useful, so we have no problems with it. There's no problem, even in terms of integration.

We use three people for the deployment and maintenance of the solution. One person is in charge of designing and implementing. Another person supports the implementation and the requirements of the customer. The third person does the monitoring exclusively. We provide our customers with the services of a security operations center.

I'm recommending AT&T AlienVault USM to others and I'm rating AT&T AlienVault USM eight out of ten.