A cloud-native SIEM that ingests everything — Microsoft, Azure, AWS, on-premises, third-party — and turns it into incidents your analysts can actually work.
Sentinel is Microsoft's cloud SIEM and SOAR. SIEM means it collects logs from everywhere — Microsoft 365, Azure, your AWS accounts, your on-premises firewalls, your network gear, your custom apps — and runs detection rules across all of it. SOAR means it can automate parts of the response, so analysts don't manually click through the same steps every time the same alert fires.
Defender XDR handles the Microsoft side natively — most M365 incidents arrive there pre-correlated. Sentinel is what you add when you have data that doesn't live inside Microsoft. A real SOC usually runs both, with XDR feeding incidents into Sentinel alongside everything else.
Sentinel is billed per gigabyte ingested. The work of a good deployment isn't connecting every possible source — it's choosing the ones that matter, and rejecting the rest. We have seen Sentinel bills five times higher than they needed to be because somebody enabled every connector on day one. Discipline pays for itself in months.
A Sentinel workspace deployed into a dedicated Log Analytics workspace, with retention sized to your compliance requirements and ingestion scoped to the sources that produce actionable signal. Data connectors for Microsoft 365, Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Entra ID, and Azure Activity — and any third-party sources we agree are worth the gigabytes.
Analytics rules running, tuned to your environment, with false positives suppressed and incident priorities tied to your business impact. Workbooks for the things your team actually monitors — not the seventy default workbooks that ship with Sentinel and nobody opens.
Logic Apps playbooks automating the response steps your SOC was doing manually — enriching alerts with threat intelligence, isolating endpoints, disabling compromised accounts, opening tickets. Hunting queries in KQL for the patterns specific to your environment, and a SOC that can write more of them.
Weeks 1–3. Define the security and compliance objectives. Decide what Sentinel needs to do — improve identity threat detection, monitor multi-cloud workloads, meet retention requirements, centralize response. Choose subscription and resource group structure. Plan data sources by value, not by availability. By the end of this phase, you know what you're paying for and why.
Weeks 4–8. Deploy the Log Analytics workspace, onboard Sentinel, enable the planned connectors in priority order. Validate ingestion volume against estimates. Adjust where reality differs from the plan. By the end of this phase, the data is flowing and the bill is predictable.
Weeks 9–12. Enable built-in analytics rules. Write custom rules in KQL for the threats specific to your environment. Tune everything to suppress false positives — most of this phase is tuning, not creating. Enable User and Entity Behavior Analytics where the data supports it. Add threat intelligence feeds.
Weeks 13–14. Build Logic Apps playbooks for the top three incident types your SOC works most. Hand over to the SOC team — they observe the first runs, then they drive. Document hunting queries and workbooks. Train analysts on KQL so the system stays useful past handover.
If you want to talk through your situation — what you're trying to detect, what data sources you have, whether you're starting from scratch or replacing an existing SIEM — write to us.
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