Getting More Detection Value from Microsoft Sentinel
Agentic, AI and Cybersecurity
Getting More Detection Value from Microsoft Sentinel
Simon Hunt, Chief Product Officer, Securonix
Detection engineering has become one of the least questioned costs in the modern SOC. Teams write queries, tune thresholds, maintain exceptions, and build enrichment logic because that work has gradually become part of running Microsoft Sentinel. While necessary, it still relies heavily on manual effort.
Microsoft Sentinel gives security teams a strong foundation for collecting telemetry, investigating incidents, and orchestrating response. Strain appears in everything that must happen around that strong foundation. As environments scale, so does the amount of detection content that needs to be created, tested, documented, and maintained.
Over time, that work can start to compete with the investigations it was meant to support.
Why Does More Telemetry Still Leave Teams with Gaps?
Security teams are already challenged with collecting activity across identities, infrastructure, and everything in between. However, the real challenge is determining which signals deserve attention and how they connect. A compromised account may use valid credentials, or a privilege change may be permitted. Viewed separately, none of those events may justify escalation. Viewed together, over several hours or days, they may reveal credential abuse, lateral movement, insider risk, or preparation for ransomware.
Attackers increasingly use valid credentials and built-in administrative tools to blend into routine system and network activity. CISA has documented how these “living off the land” techniques allow threat actors to operate through legitimate tools, reduce their visibility in standard logs, and avoid some endpoint detections. Static rules are important, but they struggle when the risk only becomes clear through changes in behavior across multiple systems and identities.
Threat Analytics for Microsoft Sentinel applies behavioral analytics, cross-source correlation, curated threat intelligence, entity context, and dynamic risk scoring to telemetry already collected by Sentinel. The enriched detections return directly to Sentinel, giving analysts more context without changing where they investigate and respond.
Context Before Investigation
Many investigations begin with a signal and a long search for everything around it.
An analyst may need to review authentication history, find related alerts, check threat intelligence, assess asset criticality, map the activity to MITRE ATT&CK, and work out whether several low-severity events belong to the same incident. Experienced analysts know how to do this well, but it takes time. Under pressure, the quality of that work can vary across the team.
Threat Analytics brings more of that work forward. It connects activity across users, identities, devices, workloads, applications, and time, then prioritizes the findings according to cumulative risk. Analysts begin with a fuller view of the incident rather than a disconnected alert.
Judgment still sits with the analyst. The system can gather context, connect behavior, and surface risk, but people still decide what the evidence means and what action is appropriate. That balance becomes key when the response could affect a user, a business process, or a critical system.
How Much Detection Content Should Every Team Maintain Alone?
Every organization has its own architecture, users, and risk profile. Internal detection strategy will always matter because no external content library can fully reflect the way a specific business operates. There is also a large amount of common work that security teams repeat. A detection has to be designed, tested, tuned, validated, documented, mapped, and updated. Attackers rapidly change their methods. An analytic that worked well six months ago may lose relevance unless someone continues to maintain it.
We’ve included more than 2,400 continuously maintained detections in our Threat Analytics backed by Securonix Threat Labs. Threat Coverage Analyzer maps detection content to MITRE ATT&CK and helps teams identify meaningful gaps. ThreatWatch can revisit historical telemetry when new indicators and techniques emerge, allowing analysts to find activity that may not have looked suspicious when it first occurred.
Internal teams can then spend more of their time on the detections that are specific to their own environment. They still own the strategy, but they are no longer carrying the full weight of maintaining every part of the foundation themselves.
Keeping Sentinel at the Center
Replacing a SIEM affects far more than technology. Analysts have learned how to investigate in the platform and reporting, governance, and escalation processes have grown around it.
We designed Threat Analytics to work with the telemetry Sentinel already collects and return higher-confidence detections into the workflows analysts already use. It does not require another analyst console, duplicate customer storage, new customer-side ingestion pipelines, or additional endpoint agents.
For Microsoft-first teams, continuity is important. Analysts keep working in the environment they know, while behavioral context and risk-based prioritization improve the quality of what reaches them.
Product teams can underestimate the cost of asking customers to change. A new workflow may look simple in a demonstration, yet still create weeks of training, integration work, process design, and governance review. Respecting the customer’s existing operating model is part of good product design.
A Better Use of the SOC’s Time
A stronger Sentinel operation has fewer disconnected signals reaching the analyst. Related activity is correlated earlier, risk develops as behavior accumulates, and threat intelligence and entity context help explain why an incident deserves attention.
Detection content also keeps moving as attacker techniques change, without placing the entire maintenance burden on the customer. Microsoft Sentinel is the operational foundation, while Threat Analytics adds behavioral depth, maintained detection content, and clearer prioritization around it.
Security leaders are trying to get more from the platforms they already own. They want better coverage, faster investigations, and fewer false positives, while avoiding another migration or another console competing for the analyst’s attention.
And they will always need skilled detection engineers. Their time should go toward understanding the risks unique to the business, rather than repeatedly rebuilding and maintaining the same analytic foundation. We should be designing products that give them the space to do that.
