A “SIEM tool (Security Information and Event Management)” is a security solution that centrally collects, correlates, and analyzes security-relevant events and log data from various IT systems, applications, network components, and cloud services. The main objective of SIEM is to detect security incidents more quickly, reveal relationships between individual events, meet compliance requirements, and support incident response processes within the organization.
Centralized log and event collection: Automated collection of log data and events from servers, firewalls, endpoints, applications, cloud services, and identity systems.
Event correlation: Linking individual events using rules and use cases to detect patterns, attack chains (kill chain), and anomalies.
Real-time alerting: Generating alerts for security-critical events, such as suspicious login attempts, malware indicators, or policy violations.
Dashboards & security monitoring: Visualizing the security posture in clear dashboards, including KPI and status overviews for Security Operations Centers (SOC) and management.
Threat intelligence integration: Connecting external threat intelligence feeds to automatically identify known malicious IP addresses, domains, hashes, or attack patterns.
Anomaly and behavioral analytics: Using statistical methods and, in some cases, machine learning to identify unusual user, system, or network behavior.
Incident management (incident handling): Supporting the analysis, prioritization, and handling of security incidents through workflows, ticketing integration, and playbooks.
Forensic analysis and log search: Powerful search and filtering capabilities to reconstruct historical events, perform root-cause analyses, and preserve evidence.
Compliance and audit reporting: Creating reports to meet legal and regulatory requirements (e.g., ISO 27001, GDPR, industry-specific regulations).
Role-based access control: Managing access rights to dashboards, data, and functions for different roles (e.g., SOC analyst, auditor, management).
Automation / SOAR integration: Integrating with Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR) solutions to trigger response actions (e.g., blocking accounts, IPs) in a semi- or fully automated way.
A company consolidates log data from firewalls, Active Directory, e-mail gateways, and cloud applications to detect attack attempts centrally.
A SOC monitors suspicious sign-in attempts from unusual countries in real time and automatically initiates incident response measures when correlated events occur.
A financial services provider uses SIEM reports to provide evidence for external audits and compliance reviews.
A manufacturing company uses SIEM to analyze security incidents in its OT/IIoT network and correlates them with events from office IT.
A managed security service provider (MSSP) monitors multiple customer environments via a centralized SIEM platform.
Splunk Enterprise Security
IBM Security QRadar SIEM
Microsoft Sentinel
Elastic SIEM (Elastic Security)
LogRhythm SIEM
Micro Focus ArcSight (OpenText ArcSight)
AlienVault / AT&T Cybersecurity USM