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Microsoft Sentinel

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

Microsoft Sentinel is Microsoft's cloud-native SIEM and SOAR platform, ingesting signals from Defender, Entra, Office 365, AWS, and on-prem syslog to detect, correlate, and auto-respond to threats. GR IT Services deploys Sentinel with custom KQL detections, MITRE-aligned analytics rules, and 24/7 SOC triage for US enterprises under a five-minute P1 incident SLA.

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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.

Taken from a live managed-SOC client portal: daily ingestion volume, current detection coverage, the automated playbooks in place, and the event feed our analysts are actually working through.
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 license; the engagement tiers below apply across all of them.

What Sentinel does

Six SIEM disciplines, one platform.

The platform ingests, detects, hunts and responds. Our part is designing which data sources feed it, writing the detections, automating the responses and then running the SOC on top, with one team doing all four rather than four vendors doing one each.

Data ingestion

Connectors ship natively for M365 Defender, Entra, Intune, Azure, AWS, GCP and Office 365, with over 150 third-party log sources behind them. Anything proprietary gets custom ingestion built through Logic Apps or the Codeless Connector.

Detection engineering

The built-in rule library plus KQL detections written specifically against your environment. Everything is held under version control, tested before it goes live and tuned so false positives do not reach an analyst.

Threat hunting

Hunting queries written proactively against advanced persistent threat behavior. What a hunt finds becomes a detection, and a detection that proves itself becomes automation.

Automated response (SOAR)

Logic Apps playbooks handle the routine work, locking accounts, blocking addresses, sweeping mailboxes and collecting evidence. That buys back analyst hours for the incidents that genuinely need a person thinking about them.

Workbooks and dashboards

Workbooks built for whoever is reading them: technical dashboards for the SOC floor, summaries leadership can act on, and compliance views written for an auditor.

Compliance and audit

Sentinel as the place your evidence lives, covering incident management under ISO 27001, the respond and recover functions of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, and the IT general controls tested under SOX. Logs an auditor can read, the configuration history behind them, and a record of how each incident was handled.

Beyond core SIEM

Three feature pillars we deploy and tune.

There are several products inside Sentinel rather than one. Switching it on is not deployment. Each pillar goes in with its own detection content, its own dashboards and playbooks tuned against your environment.

Core SIEM Capabilities

Four disciplines decide whether a SIEM is any good: getting the data in, writing the detections, hunting through what arrives, and responding to what matters. Each one is delivered with custom content, detections under version control, and runbooks somebody can follow.

  • 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

Half the value sits in the platform and the other half in the people watching it. Our SOC runs Sentinel around the clock, carries out the hunts, triggers the playbooks and produces the evidence an audit will 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

Machine learning models come with the product and you can bring your own alongside them. We wire Fusion, anomaly detection and threat intelligence enrichment directly into the detection pipeline rather than leaving them switched on and unused.

  • 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.

Three things sink a Sentinel deployment: nobody writing KQL detections, nobody tuning out the false positives, and nobody actually operating the SOC. We cover all three.

50+ Sentinel tenants

Having seen the same problems repeatedly counts for something. We have written KQL detection libraries for banks, hospital groups and retailers, which means the recurring traps and the tuning patterns behind them are familiar territory.

KQL fluency

Detections are developed in KQL as a matter of course. Hunting queries graduate into detections and detections graduate into automation, with everything reviewed in Git and held under version control like any other code.

24/7 SOC coverage

Senior SOC analysts working remotely and aligned to the hours your business actually runs. The people responding are the people who wrote your detections, and a P1 gets a response inside five minutes.

Audit-ready evidence

When ISO 27001, NIST CSF or a SOX review comes round, the answers come out of Sentinel telemetry, the detection library and the incident response log. The evidence is a byproduct rather than a project.

Industries using Sentinel

Sentinel deployments by sector.

Six industries where moving from basic logging to Sentinel makes a measurable difference to what gets detected and how fast it is answered.

Financial services

Firms answering to the SEC and to NYDFS Part 500 run it as the SIEM their regulator expects, as the source of audit-trail evidence, and as the system of record when an incident has to be coordinated with a regulator.

Healthcare

Hospitals and physician groups use it for telemetry off clinical systems, for auditing who touched protected health information, for containing ransomware quickly, and for producing evidence that satisfies a HIPAA assessment.

Professional services

Law firms and consultancies use it to audit access matter by matter, to evidence that ethical walls are genuinely enforced, and to secure the portals partners and clients log into.

Tech and SaaS

Software companies make it the SIEM of record behind their SOC 2 evidence, write custom detections against their own applications, and automate the response paths.

Retail and e-commerce

Retail groups pull point of sale telemetry into it, run fraud detection against their e-commerce estate, produce PCI DSS audit evidence from it, and alert on anomalies in the payment systems.

Critical infrastructure

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

Common use cases

Six places clients deploy Sentinel first.

Nearly every engagement begins with one or two of these and grows outward. The detection content we write moves across all of them without being rebuilt.

  • Multi-cloud security monitoring

    Bring AWS, Azure, GCP and on-premises signals into a single workspace, with correlation rules that work across all the providers at once.

  • Compliance and auditing

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

  • Insider threat detection

    Behavior analytics scoring each user and entity, watching for privilege escalation, exfiltration patterns and access at hours nobody should be working.

  • IoT and OT monitoring

    Dedicated connectors and detection rules built for operational technology estates and IoT fleets, working alongside Defender for IoT wherever it is deployed.

  • Threat hunting

    KQL hunts run proactively, with Jupyter notebooks behind them, looking for the persistent threat behavior your rules were never written to catch.

  • Incident-response automation

    Logic Apps playbooks isolate the endpoint, block the address, sweep the mailbox and collect the evidence, none of which requires an analyst to click anything.

Native integrations

Sentinel ingests across the Microsoft and partner ecosystem.

The product only earns its cost when it can see the whole picture. Native connectors go in across the Microsoft estate and the Azure-native services, alongside third-party SaaS and security tooling, with on-premises syslog and CEF feeds landing in the same workspace as everything else.

Microsoft 365 Defender

A native two-way connector brings Defender alerts and incidents into Sentinel so investigation can run across every signal at once.

  • 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

Activity, resource and security data arrive from Azure with no agent to deploy, and Defender for Cloud findings sit inline beside the SIEM detections rather than in a separate console.

  • 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

More than a hundred partner connectors, covering Palo Alto, Fortinet, Cisco ASA, Sophos and F5 through to AWS CloudTrail, GCP audit logs, Okta, Salesforce and ServiceNow.

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

On-Premises

CEF and syslog come in through Linux collectors and Splunk forwarders, with the Codeless Connector picking up anything proprietary. Nothing in the estate gets left outside the workspace.

  • 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.

A good number of our clients turn up after a year of arguing with an on-premises Splunk license. Compared honestly:
Infrastructure overhead
On-prem SIEMIndexers, search heads, storage
Microsoft SentinelNone (Azure-managed)
Native M365 / Entra integration
On-prem SIEMCustom connector required
Microsoft SentinelNative, no license
Pricing model
On-prem SIEMVolume + indexer licensing
Microsoft SentinelPay-per-GB ingest, commitment tiers
Detection authoring
For most teams KQL is an easier language to pick up than SPL or AQL.
On-prem SIEMSPL or AQL
Microsoft SentinelKQL
SOAR automation
On-prem SIEMSeparate product
Microsoft SentinelBuilt-in via Logic Apps
Storage retention
On-prem SIEMLimited by infrastructure
Microsoft SentinelAuto-archive to cheap storage
Time to first detection
On-prem SIEMMonths
Microsoft SentinelWeeks
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 license
Pricing model
Volume + indexer licensingPay-per-GB ingest, commitment tiers
Detection authoring
For most teams KQL is an easier language to pick up than SPL or AQL.
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.

These come from a portfolio of more than fifty Sentinel clients, averaged across twelve months after deployment rather than picked from the best account. The detection volume number assumes we ran both the tuning work and the SOC engagement.
300%
Average ROI

Measured against deployment cost plus a year of managed SOC, and calculated from incidents that did not happen and tools that were switched off.

99.8%
Uptime

The availability you get from a cloud-native SIEM, with automatic archiving and managed retention behind your compliance evidence.

Zero
Breaches post-deployment

Measured across managed-SOC clients over the last twelve months, with every P1 incident contained inside its SLA.

How Sentinel pricing works

Start by paying for what you actually ingest, and commit later only when the numbers justify it.

Billing works per gigabyte into a Log Analytics workspace, with a Sentinel charge on top of each gigabyte. Commitment tiers at 100, 200 and 500 GB per day cut the per-gigabyte rate meaningfully. During discovery we model what you are likely to ingest and recommend a tier with headroom, so you neither over-commit on day one nor get caught out by growth in the third month.

  • Pay-as-you-go, no minimum commitment to start
  • At 500 GB per day the commitment tier takes roughly sixty percent off the per-gigabyte rate
  • Several Microsoft sources are free, Entra logs and M365 Defender alerts among them, and never count against your ingestion
  • Anything older than ninety days archives itself off to cheaper storage automatically
  • 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.

The same four stages on every Sentinel engagement, each documented, evidenced, and delivered against a timeline agreed at the start.
  1. 1

    Data audit

    1-2 weeks

    We inventory every log source, measure the ingestion volume behind each, and run a threat-modeling workshop. You get back a source list and a map of where detection coverage actually sits.

  2. 2

    Deployment

    3-6 weeks

    The workspace is provisioned, connectors go in, baseline rules are switched on, custom detections get written, dashboards are built and the playbooks are created.

  3. 3

    Validation

    1-2 weeks

    Detections are tested against simulated attacks, false positives are triaged out, and every playbook is dry-run before it can act on anything real. The coverage map is then checked back against the threat model rather than assumed correct.

  4. 4

    Operate

    Continuous

    Round-the-clock SOC cover, a threat report each month, a detection engineering review each quarter, and tuning that never really stops. The team running it is the team that built it.

Real Sentinel deployments

Three incidents Sentinel caught and closed.

Three genuine engagements in which detection plus an operating SOC turned what would have been a breach into a contained incident. Sector, problem, what was done, what happened.
Financial services
Challenge

An operator got in through a phished invoice attachment and began staging encryption across the Windows file servers. The antivirus running on site reported nothing at all.

What we did

A custom KQL detection picked up the abnormal write volume across the SMB shares in ninety seconds. The SOAR playbook then isolated the host, suspended the account and started paging the incident response team.

Outcome

Fourteen files out of twenty four thousand were encrypted before it stopped, and everything was restored from snapshot within two hours.

Seven-figure ransom avoided
Technology company
Challenge

A senior engineer working a thirty day notice period began pulling source code archives at twice the usual volume, at unusual hours, concealed inside genuine backup traffic.

What we did

The behavior analytics risk score crossed its threshold and the departing-employee playbook notified compliance and HR. A forensic timeline then reconstructed eleven days of activity and made the intent unambiguous.

Outcome

Repository access was pulled before the transfer finished, no intellectual property left the business, and the evidence was packaged for the legal team.

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

A credential stuffing run against the customer-facing application crossed AWS load balancers, an Azure-hosted login and on-premises identity. Taken separately, not one of those log sources looked unusual.

What we did

A cross-cloud correlation rule written in KQL joined AWS WAF, Azure sign-in and on-premises firewall logs into one picture. It blocked the source network at the edge automatically and forced a password reset across the twenty six affected accounts.

Outcome

No account was taken over, no customer data was reached, and the write-up went to the security committee afterwards.

Zero accounts compromised
Common questions

Microsoft Sentinel, frequently asked.

You pay per gigabyte ingested into the Log Analytics workspace, with a Sentinel charge on top of that per gigabyte. Commitment tiers at 100GB, 200GB and 500GB a day bring the per-gigabyte rate down considerably. During discovery we model what your ingestion is likely to be and recommend a tier with headroom built in.

It does. Native connectors cover AWS CloudTrail, GCP audit logs, Palo Alto, Fortinet, Cisco ASA, Sophos and F5, with Common Event Format and Syslog picking up whatever is left. Where the application is proprietary, we build the connector ourselves through Logic Apps or a REST API.

A detection fires an alert. An analyst has eyes on it inside five minutes for a P1 and fifteen for a P2. The response runs whichever playbook applies, blocking the account, sweeping the mailbox, isolating the device, collecting the evidence. A written incident report reaches you within a day.

It happens on two levels. Day to day we adjust detection thresholds and exclusion lists as things surface. Each quarter there is a detection engineering review where recent alerts get triaged and the underlying queries are rewritten. False positive volume typically falls by more than seventy percent across the first quarter.

User and entity behavior analytics comes with the platform and is on by default at Enterprise tier. It scores anomalies per user and per entity, and that risk signal feeds into conditional access through Entra ID Identity Protection.

They do, through the Microsoft 365 Defender connector, which brings Defender alerts and incidents into Sentinel as one stream. Most clients run both together, with Defender supplying endpoint and identity telemetry and Sentinel providing the SIEM and SOAR layer above it.

Detections worth having start firing four to six weeks in. Coverage reaches maturity around the third month, and SOC operations settle into steady state by the fourth. What moves that timeline either way is how quickly data sources can be onboarded, and that depends entirely on your environment.

Regularly. We assess where things stand, then name the detection gaps, the ingestion costs that are not earning their keep, and the operational holes in how the SOC runs. Four to six weeks covers most takeovers, and both detection coverage and false positive rates move measurably in that time.
Further reading

Resources for security operations leads.

Microsoft Defender

Endpoint detection and response, identity protection and email security in one family. Its XDR alerts flow into Sentinel so detection and response happen in a single place.

Learn more

Microsoft Entra

The identity platform whose audit logs land in Sentinel. Privileged Identity Management, conditional access and Identity Protection all plug into risk-based detection.

Learn more

Cybersecurity audit

An independent audit, useful either side of a Sentinel deployment. The penetration test proves whether your detections actually see an attack, and the audit produces the remediation roadmap that follows.

Learn more
Ready to deploy Sentinel properly?

Talk to a security operations specialist.

The form takes three minutes. Our security team replies the same business day to arrange a discovery call, where we will tell you which data sources to onboard first and what detection coverage realistically looks like in an environment like yours.

Get a Sentinel quoteSee cybersecurity audit

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