Microsoft Sentinel

Microsoft Sentinel, SIEM that catches the attack you didn't see coming.

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Microsoft
Microsoft
Sentinel
Cloud Solution Partner
  • 50+Sentinel tenants
  • 5minP1 SOC response
  • KQLCustom detections
  • 24/7SOC operations
A real Sentinel SOC dashboard

What a tuned Sentinel deployment looks like.

Pulled from a managed-SOC client portal. Daily ingestion volume, detection coverage, automated playbooks, and the live event feed our analysts work from.
Preview
Events Ingested Today
50B+
150+ connected sources
Detection Coverage
94
/ 100
MITRE ATT&CK mapped
Faster Detection
80%
vs traditional SIEM
Sentinel Workloads
  • Custom KQL detections14 live
  • SOAR playbooks12 active
  • Threat hunts (this week)7 closed
  • UEBA risk users flagged3
SOC Live Pulse
  • Phishing campaign auto-blocked, 22 users
    3 min ago
  • Suspicious AWS API key usage flagged
    18 min ago
  • Defender alert correlated, incident opened
    52 min ago
  • Lateral movement detected, contained
    2 hr ago
P1 Response
< 5 min
SOC analyst acknowledged

Indicative dashboard. Real client tenants vary by ingestion volume and licence; the engagement tiers below apply across all of them.

What Sentinel does

Six SIEM disciplines, one platform.

Sentinel ingests, detects, hunts, and responds. We design the data sources, build the detections, automate the responses, and operate the SOC, all from the same team.

Data ingestion

Native connectors for M365 Defender, Entra, Intune, Azure, AWS, GCP, Office 365, plus 150+ third-party log sources. Custom ingestion for proprietary apps via Logic Apps or Codeless Connector.

Detection engineering

Out-of-the-box rule library plus custom KQL detections written for your environment. Detections version-controlled, tested, tuned for false positives.

Threat hunting

Proactive hunting queries for advanced-persistent-threat patterns. Hunting outputs converted to detections; detections promoted to automation.

Automated response (SOAR)

Logic Apps playbooks for routine incidents: account lockouts, IP blocks, mailbox sweeps, evidence collection. Free analyst time for the incidents that need a human.

Workbooks and dashboards

Custom workbooks per stakeholder: technical dashboards for the SOC, executive summaries for leadership, compliance views for auditors.

Compliance and audit

Sentinel as the evidence platform for ISO 27001 A.16, NIST CSF T5, SOX SYSC. Audit-ready logs, configuration history, incident response evidence.

Beyond core SIEM

Three feature pillars we deploy and tune.

Sentinel is many products in one. We do not just turn it on, we deploy each pillar with detection content, dashboards, and playbooks tuned for your environment.

Core SIEM Capabilities

The disciplines every SIEM has to do well: ingestion, detection authoring, hunting, and response. We deploy each with custom content, version-controlled detections, and runbooks.

  • Cloud-native ingestion across M365, Azure, AWS, GCP
  • 150+ native connectors plus CEF / Syslog / REST
  • Out-of-the-box rule library activation and tuning
  • Custom KQL detections written for your environment

SOC Operations

The platform is one half; the SOC is the other. Our 24/7 SOC operates Sentinel, runs hunts, executes playbooks, and produces the evidence audits ask for.

  • Incident management with full audit trails
  • Investigation workbooks per stakeholder
  • Proactive threat hunting with KQL + Notebooks
  • UEBA insider-threat scoring per entity
  • Logic Apps SOAR playbooks for routine response

AI and Machine Learning

Sentinel ships ML models out-of-the-box and lets you bring your own. We wire Fusion, anomaly detection, and threat-intel enrichment into the detection pipeline.

  • Fusion correlates low-fidelity signals into incidents
  • Anomaly detection on user, network, and system activity
  • Threat-intel enrichment from Microsoft and partners
  • Custom Azure ML models for domain-specific risk
Why GR IT for Sentinel

Four reasons clients pick us for the deployment.

Sentinel deployments fail when no one writes KQL detections, no one tunes false positives, and no one operates the SOC. We do all three.

50+ Sentinel tenants

Pattern recognition matters. We have built KQL detection libraries across financial services, healthcare, and retail. Common detection traps, common tuning patterns.

KQL fluency

Custom detection development in KQL. Threat-hunting queries promoted to detections, detections promoted to automation. Code reviewed in Git, version-controlled.

US-based 24/7 SOC

Senior SOC analysts based in the United States. Same time zone as your operations, same team that built the detections, P1 incident response in 5 minutes.

Audit-ready evidence

ISO 27001, NIST CSF, SOX reviews answered with Sentinel telemetry, detection libraries, and incident response logs. Compliance-ready by default.

Industries using Sentinel

Sentinel deployments by sector.

Six sectors where Sentinel provides material detection and response uplift over basic logging.

Financial services

SEC- and NYDFS-regulated firms using Sentinel for regulator-required SIEM, audit-trail evidence, and regulator-coordinated incident response.

Healthcare

Hospitals and medical groups using Sentinel for clinical-system telemetry, PHI access auditing, ransomware containment, HIPAA-compliant evidence.

Professional services

Law firms and consultancies using Sentinel for matter-based access auditing, ethical-wall enforcement evidence, partner-portal security.

Tech and SaaS

SaaS companies using Sentinel as their SIEM-of-record for SOC 2 evidence, custom detections for proprietary apps, automated response.

Retail and e-commerce

Retail groups using Sentinel for POS telemetry, e-commerce fraud detection, PCI DSS audit evidence, payment-system anomaly alerts.

Critical infrastructure

Utilities, large hospitality, multi-site operators using Sentinel for OT/IT segmentation evidence, NIST CSF audit support, NCEMA continuity controls.

Common use cases

Six places clients deploy Sentinel first.

Most engagements start with one or two of these workloads, then expand. The detection content we build is portable across them.

  • Multi-cloud security monitoring

    Centralise AWS, Azure, GCP, and on-prem signals into one workspace with correlation rules across providers.

  • Compliance and auditing

    Built-in templates and audit trails for ISO 27001, NIST CSF, SOX, PCI DSS, HIPAA, plus custom frameworks.

  • Insider threat detection

    UEBA scoring per user and entity for privilege escalation, data-exfil patterns, off-hours access.

  • IoT and OT monitoring

    Specialty connectors and detection rules for OT estates and IoT fleets, paired with Defender for IoT where present.

  • Threat hunting

    Proactive KQL hunts and Jupyter notebooks for advanced-persistent-threat patterns the rules miss.

  • Incident-response automation

    Logic Apps playbooks isolate endpoints, block IPs, sweep mailboxes, and gather evidence without analyst clicks.

Native integrations

Sentinel ingests across the Microsoft and partner ecosystem.

Sentinel is at its best when it sees everything. We wire native connectors for the Microsoft estate, Azure-native services, third-party SaaS and security tools, plus on-prem syslog and CEF feeds in the same workspace.

Microsoft 365 Defender

Native bidirectional connector unifies Defender alerts and incidents into Sentinel for cross-signal investigation.

  • Defender for Endpoint, Identity, Office 365, Cloud Apps
  • Entra ID sign-in, audit, and risk logs
  • Microsoft Information Protection (Purview)
  • Bidirectional incident and case sync

Azure Native

Azure activity, resource, and security data flow into Sentinel without agents. Defender for Cloud findings appear inline with SIEM detections.

  • Azure Activity, NSG, and resource diagnostic logs
  • Defender for Cloud (CSPM + CWPP)
  • Azure AD Identity Protection signals
  • Key Vault, Storage, and PaaS audit feeds

Third-Party Tools

100+ partner connectors for Palo Alto, Fortinet, Cisco ASA, Sophos, F5, AWS CloudTrail, GCP audit, Okta, Salesforce, ServiceNow.

  • AWS CloudTrail, GuardDuty, Security Hub
  • GCP audit, VPC flow, Security Command Centre
  • Palo Alto, Fortinet, Cisco ASA, Sophos, F5
  • Okta, ServiceNow, Salesforce, Workday

On-Premises

CEF and syslog ingestion via Linux collectors, Splunk forwarders, and Codeless Connector for proprietary apps. Nothing left behind.

  • Common Event Format (CEF) over syslog
  • Linux syslog collectors with high availability
  • Splunk Universal Forwarder bridging
  • Codeless Connector for REST and JSON APIs
Sentinel vs traditional on-prem SIEM

What Sentinel adds over Splunk-on-prem.

Many clients arrive after a year of Splunk-on-prem licensing pain. The honest comparison:
Feature
On-prem SIEM
Splunk / QRadar
Microsoft Sentinel
Cloud-native
Infrastructure overhead
Indexers, search heads, storageNone (Azure-managed)
Native M365 / Entra integration
Custom connector requiredNative, no licence
Pricing model
Volume + indexer licensingPay-per-GB ingest, commitment tiers
Detection authoring
KQL is more accessible than SPL or AQL for most teams.
SPL or AQLKQL
SOAR automation
Separate productBuilt-in via Logic Apps
Storage retention
Limited by infrastructureAuto-archive to cheap storage
Time to first detection
MonthsWeeks
Measurable Sentinel impact

What clients see after a tuned Sentinel deployment.

Numbers from our 50+ Sentinel client portfolio. Averages from 12-month post-deployment, not best-case. The detection volume figure assumes we ran the tuning and SOC engagement.
300%
Average ROI

vs the cost of the deployment plus 12 months of managed SOC, calculated from incidents avoided and tooling consolidated.

99.8%
Uptime

Cloud-native SIEM availability, with auto-archive and managed retention for compliance evidence.

Zero
Breaches post-deployment

Across managed-SOC clients in the past 12 months, with all P1 incidents contained inside SLA.

How Sentinel pricing works

Pay only for what you ingest, then commit if it makes sense.

Sentinel is pay-per-GB into a Log Analytics workspace, plus a Sentinel surcharge per GB. There are commitment tiers (100 / 200 / 500 GB / day) that reduce per-GB cost meaningfully. We model your expected ingestion in the discovery and recommend a tier with a buffer, so you do not over-commit early or get burned by month-three growth.

  • Pay-as-you-go, no minimum commitment to start
  • Commitment tiers reduce per-GB cost up to ~60% at 500 GB / day
  • Free Microsoft data sources (Entra logs, M365 Defender alerts) do not count toward ingest
  • Auto-archive cold data to cheap storage past 90 days
  • Quarterly review of ingestion vs. commitment to right-size
Get a Sentinel cost model
How a deployment runs

From data source audit to managed SOC operations.

Every Sentinel engagement runs the same path. Documented, evidenced, deliverable on a fixed timeline.
  1. 1

    Data audit

    1-2 weeks

    Catalogue of log sources, ingestion volumes, threat-model workshop. Output: source-list and detection-coverage map.

  2. 2

    Deployment

    3-6 weeks

    Workspace provisioning, connectors deployed, baseline rules activated, custom detections written, dashboards built, playbooks created.

  3. 3

    Validation

    1-2 weeks

    Detection testing with simulated attacks, false-positive triage, playbook dry-runs. Coverage map validated against the threat model.

  4. 4

    Operate

    Continuous

    24/7 SOC, monthly threat reports, quarterly detection-engineering reviews, ongoing tuning. Same team that deployed operates.

“We bought Sentinel and got a Microsoft demo. Six months later we had ingestion costs but no detections. GR IT rebuilt the deployment in 8 weeks: 14 custom KQL detections specific to our SaaS app, 5 SOAR playbooks for the routine incidents, and a SOC that actually responded to alerts. Our first real incident was contained 12 minutes after the alert fired.”
Kevin Bradley
Chief Information Security Officer · B2B SaaS company, FiDi
Real-incident containment in 12 minutes
Real Sentinel deployments

Three incidents Sentinel caught and closed.

Three real engagements where Sentinel detection plus our SOC turned a likely breach into a contained incident. Industry, challenge, action, outcome.
Financial services, Wall Street
Challenge

Ransomware operator landed via a phished invoice attachment and started staging encryption across the Windows file servers. The on-prem antivirus was clean.

What we did

Custom KQL detection caught the unusual write-volume burst across SMB shares within 90 seconds. SOAR playbook isolated the host, suspended the user account, and triggered the IR team paging tree.

Outcome

Encryption was halted on 14 of 24,000 files, full recovery from snapshot inside 2 hours.

USD 2.3M ransom avoided
Tech, San Francisco
Challenge

Senior engineer on a 30-day notice started downloading source code archives at 2x normal volume across odd hours, hidden inside legitimate backup activity.

What we did

UEBA risk score crossed the threshold, departing-employee playbook alerted compliance and HR. Sentinel forensic timeline reconstructed the exfil intent across 11 days.

Outcome

Repository access revoked before exfil completed, IP loss prevented, evidence packaged for legal.

Insider exfil contained
Multi-cloud SaaS, NYDFS Part 500
Challenge

Credential-stuffing burst against the customer-facing app spanned AWS load balancers, Azure-hosted login, and on-prem identity. None of the individual logs looked alarming on their own.

What we did

Cross-cloud KQL correlation rule fused AWS WAF, Azure AD sign-in, and on-prem firewall logs. Auto-blocked the source ASN at the edge, forced password reset on 26 affected accounts.

Outcome

Account takeover prevented, no customer data accessed, post-incident write-up to the security committee.

Zero accounts compromised
Common questions

Microsoft Sentinel, frequently asked.

Further reading

Resources for security operations leads.

Microsoft Defender

Endpoint EDR, identity protection, email security. Defender XDR alerts feed Sentinel for unified detection and response.

Learn more

Microsoft Entra

Identity platform whose audit logs feed Sentinel. PIM, conditional access, and Identity Protection integrate for risk-based detection.

Learn more

Cybersecurity audit

Independent security audit before or after Sentinel deployment. Penetration test validates detection coverage; audit produces remediation roadmap.

Learn more
Ready to deploy Sentinel properly?

Talk to a security operations specialist.

Three-minute form. Our security team gets back the same business day to schedule a discovery call. We will tell you which data sources to prioritise and what realistic detection coverage looks like for your environment.

Get a Sentinel quoteSee cybersecurity audit

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