I was recently asked, how are automation rules managed in the Defender portal when multiple Sentinel workspaces are connected? I expected the answer to be simple. After all, I’ve spent a significant amount of time working with Sentinel, and not many things in this space come as a surprise anymore. I opened the Defender portal… Read More: Closer Look at Sentinel Automation in the Defender Portal »
Microsoft first announced Sentinel Data Lake in July 2025 and immediately generated a lot of interest across the security community. The value proposition was compelling: For many organizations, especially those collecting hundreds of gigabytes or even terabytes of data per day, Sentinel Data Lake looked like the next logical evolution of the platform. Then reality… Read More: Waiting for Sentinel Data Lake? »
What started as a simple idea, exploring how AI could support a modern Security Operations Center, has grown into a structured series that documents both real solutions and the learning journey behind them. This collection of articles is intended to walk through the evolution from traditional, deterministic automation toward more adaptive, agent-driven approaches, while sharing… Read More: AI-Driven SOC Series Overview »
Introduction This series started with a simple question: what does an agentic SOC actually look like in practice? Early on, I focused on making that idea tangible. Instead of staying theoretical, I built out a working approach using Azure AI Foundry and Azure Logic Apps. The goal was not to prescribe a single “right” architecture,… Read More: Intro and Initial Deployment of a Foundry Agent »
This started as a straightforward idea. I wanted to get Defender Threat and Vulnerability Management (TVM) data into Microsoft Sentinel for long-term retention and dashboarding. The data potentially has value, and Sentinel is designed to ingest large volumes of security data, so on the surface it felt like something that should already exist. After building… Read More: Sentinel TVM Snapshot Data Connector »
I want to take a few minutes to explore the perceived risk of public cloud endpoints, and why that risk is often misunderstood. If something has a public endpoint, it is easy to assume it is exposed. In reality, that is only part of the story. The Door in the City Imagine you have something… Read More: Are Public Endpoints Risky? »
I am excited to announce the public release of KQL Event Viewer. This is easily the most complete and useful project I have built to date. KQL Event Viewer is a Windows Event Viewer-style experience for KQL data. Instead of starting with a query, you start with the data. Tables are organized, pre-filtered, and easy… Read More: Introducing KQL Event Viewer! »
A practical alternative and complement to Security Copilot I wrote about Alternatives to Microsoft Security Copilot last year and why many organizations are still looking for practical ways to bring AI into their SOC. That conversation has continued to come up in customer engagements. Some teams do not have access yet. Others are constrained by… Read More: Building a SOC AI API with Azure AI Foundry »
In the last article, I introduced Azure AI Foundry as a way to stand up a private AI service for SOC use cases. The key idea is that the model itself is not the solution. The value comes from how you shape requests using system prompts and structured input. One deployment can support many different… Read More: SOC AI Series, Part 2: Using Logic Apps »
Over the past few months, I have shared a set of workbooks focused on closing visibility gaps across identity and endpoint security data. These were built from real-world scenarios where the signals existed, but the connections between them were not always obvious. Today I am releasing major updates to both, expanding their scope and making… Read More: Workbook Updates: Admin Risk & Compute »
Azure Workbooks are surprisingly capable and frustrating. In many ways, they are far more powerful than they appear at first glance. The UI does not always make it obvious where things live or how features connect, so it takes some effort to learn which buttons to push and in what order. Like many things in… Read More: Azure Workbooks: Hidden Gems »
I was working with a customer recently who was trying to track down changes across several subscriptions. Nothing unusual there, except we quickly realized something was missing. A number of subscriptions were not sending Azure Activity Logs to Microsoft Sentinel at all. No errors, no alerts, just silent gaps. It stood out because this is… Read More: Azure Activity Logs: A Few Practical Tips »
I recently worked with a customer who had done the right thing from a security perspective. They followed the best practice of separating standard user accounts from privileged admin accounts. Day-to-day work was done with a normal account, and elevated tasks required a separate admin identity. What they chose not to do was record the… Read More: Reconnecting Admin and User Accounts in Entra »
I recently built an Azure Monitor workbook to help customers who are struggling to verify that all Azure virtual machines are fully onboarded to Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (MDE). Repo: AndrewBlumhardt/workbooks In theory, this should be straightforward. When Defender for Servers is enabled as part of Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Azure VMs are automatically onboarded… Read More: Verifying MDE Protection for Azure VMs »