5 Signs Your SIEM Is Too Noisy
And what to do about it before your SOC burns out
Your SIEM might look functional. It might be alerting. It might even be patched and tuned.
But if any of these signals show up in your environment… you’re not running a detection platform.
You’re running a noise machine.
Here are 5 signs it’s time to step back — and some fast fixes.
🚨 1. High-Severity Alerts Get Ignored
If “High” doesn’t actually mean “drop everything,” the system has lost trust.
Overuse of high-severity tagging just teaches analysts to scroll past the most important stuff.
Fix it:
- Recalibrate your severity logic
- Reserve “High” for real, active threats
- Flag stale rules that fire constantly at high severity
🧱 2. Dashboards Nobody Looks At
A dashboard isn’t a strategy.
If it doesn’t support a decision — it’s just decoration.
Fix it:
- Audit what’s used and what isn’t
- Ask: what action is this view driving?
- Kill or consolidate dashboards that create no operational value
🧠 3. Rules Keep Getting Added (But Nobody Knows Why)
If you have 200+ correlation rules and no ownership model, it’s not coverage — it’s chaos.
Layering rule on rule creates friction, duplication, and decay.
Fix it:
- Review detection content regularly
- Assign owners or use tags per team/use case
- Start pruning — you can’t fix what you don’t know exists
🔁 4. The Same Alerts Fire Every Day
This is the SOC equivalent of spam.
If your analysts already know it’s noise, they’ve stopped reading.
Fix it:
- Use thresholds and event count logic
- Introduce macros or lookup-based suppression
- Review rule logic against real events, not just test cases
🔍 5. Analysts Are Ignoring the Alerts
This is the endgame.
When the humans at the end of the pipeline stop listening, your SIEM is just a box shouting into a void.
Fix it:
- Review upstream: log quality, parsing, field mapping
- Check acceleration and data model health
- Interview the analysts. The truth is in the trenches
🎯 Final Thought:
A noisy SIEM isn’t inevitable.
But it does take intentional effort to keep it from turning on you.
If any of this feels familiar, you don’t need a new platform.
You need someone who knows how to clean up the one you’ve got.
👉 Want to cut the noise and find the signal again?
Let’s talk — get in touch.