Profile
Microsoft Sentinel is a cloud-native security information and event management (SIEM) and security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) platform that operates as a proprietary commercial service within Microsoft's cloud infrastructure. The platform provides enterprise-scale security monitoring, threat detection, and automated response capabilities through a unified interface. As Microsoft's flagship security operations platform, it integrates deeply with Microsoft Defender XDR while supporting extensive third-party integrations through over 350 data connectors, enabling comprehensive security visibility across multi-cloud and hybrid environments.
Focus
Microsoft Sentinel addresses fundamental security operations challenges by unifying security data collection, analysis, and response across diverse technology environments. The platform eliminates traditional SIEM limitations around scale, data silos, and manual correlation by providing cloud-native architecture with elastic scalability and automated analytics. It serves security operations teams, from SOC analysts conducting daily threat monitoring to security engineers building automated response workflows. Core benefits include reduced alert fatigue through AI-powered analytics, accelerated threat detection and response through automation, and simplified security operations through integrated tooling.
Background
Originally developed by Microsoft as a cloud-native alternative to traditional SIEM solutions, the platform launched as Azure Sentinel before evolving into Microsoft Sentinel to reflect its broader security capabilities. The solution is wholly owned and maintained by Microsoft Corporation, with development directed by Microsoft's security division. While the core platform remains proprietary, Microsoft maintains a public GitHub repository for community-contributed content like detection rules and playbooks. The platform operates under standard Microsoft commercial licensing agreements, with Microsoft providing direct support for core functionality while partners support their respective integrations.
Main features
Unified security data collection and normalization
The platform implements comprehensive data collection through a workspace architecture built on Azure Log Analytics, providing an append-only data store with tamper-proofing and immutability. Data ingestion supports multiple integration patterns including service-to-service APIs, agent-based collection, syslog ingestion, and custom connectors. The Advanced Security Information Model normalizes diverse security data into consistent schemas organized by activity types, enabling unified analysis across sources. Organizations can implement either query-time or ingestion-time normalization to balance flexibility with performance.
Multi-layered threat detection and analytics
The detection engine combines multiple analytical approaches including scheduled rules, machine learning-based anomaly detection, and user behavior analytics. Analytics rules written in Kusto Query Language enable detection of known attack patterns, while machine learning models identify subtle behavioral anomalies by building dynamic baselines for users, devices, and other entities. The system automatically correlates related alerts into unified incidents based on factors like time proximity and affected entities, dramatically reducing alert volume while providing rich investigation context.
Automated investigation and response orchestration
The platform provides extensive automation capabilities through a low-code development experience built on Azure Logic Apps. Automation rules evaluate incident characteristics to trigger appropriate responses, while playbooks implement complex workflows across multiple security and IT systems. The system includes hundreds of pre-built playbook templates for common scenarios like threat enrichment, containment actions, and cross-platform synchronization. Role-based access control and approval workflows ensure proper governance of automated actions, with comprehensive audit trails for compliance requirements.
