Your SIEM Alerts Are Useless If No One Reads Them

Let’s talk about your SIEM.

That shiny, expensive platform your security leadership brags about to the board:

  • “We have 100% coverage across all our assets.”
  • “We’re ingesting terabytes of logs daily.”
  • “We have 50,000 alerts per day.”

👏 Congratulations. You’ve built the world’s most expensive data landfill.

Here’s The Reality

Your SIEM alerts are useless if no one reads them.

  • An alert isn’t an investigation.
  • A correlation rule isn’t detection engineering.
  • A SIEM isn’t security. It’s just a tool.

Why Are Your Alerts Ignored?

1. Alert Fatigue

Your analysts receive thousands of alerts daily.
Most are:

  • False positives
  • Poorly tuned rules
  • Things they’ve seen a hundred times with no context

So what do they do?

They mass-close them to focus on actual incidents. Except… sometimes the real incident was in that mass-close batch.

2. No Context or Enrichment

“Suspicious PowerShell Command Detected.”

Cool. Suspicious how?

  • Is it from a known admin tool or a domain join script?
  • Is it coming from the CFO’s laptop at 2 AM?
  • Does it tie to other indicators like credential dumping?

If your alerts don’t provide context, they’re just noise. And analysts treat them as such.

3. Compliance-Driven Rules

Your SIEM is configured to pass audits, not detect threats.

  • “We have rules for PCI DSS!”
  • “We alert on all failed logins!” (even though that’s half your workforce forgetting passwords)

✔ You pass compliance.
✖ You fail to detect adversaries.

4. No Threat Intelligence Integration

Your SIEM isn’t enriched with current attacker TTPs or IOCs, so detection rules remain generic and outdated. Meanwhile, real attackers live off the land, blending in with legitimate activity.

5. You Tell Everyone About Pen Tests

“We’re doing a pen test next week.”

Cool. Why not just send attackers your SIEM’s alert tuning while you’re at it?

Here’s the truth:

If you tell your SOC and IT teams when a pentest is happening, you’re testing their calendar awareness, not your security posture.

Unannounced tests validate:

  • Whether alerts trigger
  • Whether your SOC sees them
  • Whether they actually respond

Otherwise, congratulations – you’ve just spent $40,000 to prove your team can read emails labeled “Red Team Starting Monday.”

What’s The Impact?

  • You miss real attacks because your analysts are drowning in garbage alerts.
  • You burn out your SOC team, leading to turnover and knowledge loss.
  • Your SIEM becomes an expensive log aggregation tool no one trusts.

But hey, your dashboards look great.

How To Fix It

✅ 1. Tune Your Rules

  • Reduce false positives.
  • Customize detections to your environment.
  • Retire useless compliance-only alerts or reframe them for threat detection value.

✅ 2. Add Context & Enrichment

  • Integrate asset criticality data.
  • Tie alerts to user behavior, known business processes, and threat intel hits.

✅ 3. Prioritize Based on Real Risk

  • Build detection engineering workflows to focus on what attackers are actually doing, not just what auditors want to see.

✅ 4. Empower Your Analysts

  • Give them authority to suggest rule improvements.
  • Automate triage where possible.
  • Create detection-as-code pipelines so tuning isn’t a six-month ticket process.

✅ 5. Stop Announcing Pentests

Want to know if your detection and response actually works?

Run unannounced tests.

Attackers don’t schedule their breaches for Q3. Why should your tests?

Final Thoughts

Your SIEM is only as good as:

  1. The people using it
  2. The rules powering it
  3. The processes triaging alerts

If no one reads your alerts, you don’t have detection. You have a false sense of security.

But hey, at least your compliance team is happy, right?

Now excuse me while I go build another alert no one will read.