Security Monitoring: Building Effective Detection Infrastructure

Part of the Cybersecurity Skills Guide — This article is one deep-dive in our complete guide series.

By HADESS Team | February 28, 2026 | Updated: February 28, 2026 | 5 min read

Security monitoring is not about deploying tools — it is about building a detection capability that finds real threats without burying your team in noise. The difference between a SOC that catches intrusions and one that drowns in alerts comes down to tool selection, baseline establishment, alert tuning, and dashboard design.

Tool Selection

Your monitoring stack needs to cover four visibility domains: network traffic, endpoint activity, log aggregation, and identity/authentication events. Gaps in any domain create blind spots attackers will find.

For network visibility, you need a Network Detection and Response (NDR) solution or, at minimum, Zeek generating connection logs, DNS logs, and protocol-level metadata. NetFlow/IPFIX from routers and switches provides traffic pattern data at lower storage cost than full packet capture.

For endpoints, EDR solutions (CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, Defender for Endpoint) provide process execution logs, file system activity, and network connections per host. Sysmon on Windows fills similar gaps for teams using the free tier.

Log aggregation through a SIEM (Splunk, Sentinel, Elastic) ties everything together. The SIEM is where you correlate a suspicious DNS query from Zeek with a process execution event from your EDR and an authentication event from Active Directory.

Choose tools that integrate well. A best-of-breed approach sounds good in theory, but if your NDR cannot feed alerts into your SIEM, or your EDR does not export telemetry in a usable format, you end up with visibility silos instead of correlated detections.

Baseline Establishment

You cannot detect anomalies without knowing what normal looks like. Spend time establishing baselines before writing detection rules.

Capture normal patterns for:

• Network traffic: typical bandwidth usage, common destination IPs, DNS query patterns, protocol distribution
• Authentication: normal login times, expected source IPs, MFA usage patterns
• Process execution: standard processes on each server role, expected parent-child relationships
• Data transfer: normal egress volumes, typical cloud storage usage, email attachment sizes

Baselines are not static. Re-establish them after infrastructure changes, application deployments, and organizational shifts (remote work changes, mergers).

Alert Tuning

Alert tuning is an ongoing process, not a one-time configuration. Every alert that fires should either lead to an investigation or be tuned out. Alerts that analysts consistently close as false positives waste time and train the team to ignore alerts.

Start by categorizing every alert over a two-week period:

• True positive: real malicious activity — keep and possibly improve the rule
• True positive, low priority: real but benign (vulnerability scanner, pentest) — add exclusions for known sources
• False positive: the detection logic is wrong or too broad — adjust thresholds, add context filters, or disable

Tune in iterations. After the first pass, measure your false positive rate. Aim for a true positive rate above 30% — if fewer than one in three alerts is worth investigating, your detection rules need significant work.

Dashboard Design

Dashboards should answer specific questions, not just display data. A dashboard covered in pie charts that nobody looks at provides zero value.

Build dashboards for specific use cases:

• Triage dashboard: new alerts by severity, assigned vs. unassigned cases, mean time since last analyst action
• Threat hunting dashboard: baseline deviation indicators, rare process executions, unusual outbound connections
• Health dashboard: log source status, ingestion latency, storage capacity, agent connectivity

Put the most actionable information at the top. If an analyst’s first action every morning is checking the triage dashboard, the open high-severity alerts should be the first thing they see.

Next Steps

• Evaluate your detection engineering skills with the skills assessment
• Explore SIEM, EDR, and related topics in the skills library
• Use the coaching tool to develop a structured learning path for security operations

Related Guides in This Series

• EDR: Endpoint Detection, Response, and Threat Hunting — HADESS | 2026
• Firewall Management: Rules, Zones, and Change Control — HADESS | 2026
• Hardware Security Modules: Key Management and Compliance — HADESS | 2026

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