Cut SOC Noise with an Alert-Quality SLO: A Practical Playbook for Security Teams

Security teams don’t burn out because of “too many threats.” They burn out because of too much junk between them and the real threats: noisy detections, vague alerts, fragile rules, and AI that promises magic but ships mayhem.

SOC

Here’s a simple fix that works in the real world: treat alert quality like a reliability objective. Put noise on a hard budget and enforce a ship/rollback gate—exactly like SRE error budgets. We call it an Alert-Quality SLO (AQ-SLO) and it can reclaim 20–40% of analyst time for higher-value work like hunts, tuning, and purple-team exercises.

The Core Idea: Put a Budget on Junk

Alert-Quality SLO (AQ-SLO): set an explicit ceiling for non-actionable alerts per analyst-hour (NAAH). If a new rule/model/AI feed pushes you over budget, it doesn’t ship—or it auto-rolls back.

 

Think “error budgets,” but applied to SOC signal quality.

 

Working definitions (plain language)

  • Non-actionable alert: After triage, it requires no ticket, containment, or tuning request—just closes.
  • Analyst-hour: One hour of human triage time (any level).
  • AQ-SLO: Maximum tolerated non-actionables per analyst-hour over a rolling window.

Baselines and Targets (Start Here)

Before you tune, measure. Collect 2–4 weeks of baselines:

  • Non-actionable rate (NAR) = (Non-actionables / Total alerts) × 100
  • Non-actionables per analyst-hour (NAAH) = Non-actionables / Analyst-hours
  • Mean time to triage (MTTT) = Average minutes to disposition (track P90, too)

 

Initial SLO targets (adjust to your environment):

  • NAAH ≤ 5.0  (Gold ≤ 3.0, Silver ≤ 5.0, Bronze ≤ 7.0)
  • NAR ≤ 35%    (Gold ≤ 20%, Silver ≤ 35%, Bronze ≤ 45%)
  • MTTT ≤ 6 min (with P90 ≤ 12 min)

 

These numbers are intentionally pragmatic: tight enough to curb fatigue, loose enough to avoid false heroics.

 

Ship/Rollback Gate for Rules & AI

Every new detector—rule, correlation, enrichment, or AI model—must prove itself in shadow mode before it’s allowed to page humans.

 

Shadow-mode acceptance (7 days recommended):

  • NAAH ≤ 3.0, or
  • ≥ 30% precision uplift vs. control, and
  • No regression in P90 MTTT or paging load

 

Enforcement: If the detector breaches the budget 3 days in 7, auto-disable or revert and capture a short post-mortem. You’re not punishing innovation—you’re defending analyst attention.

 

Minimum Viable Telemetry (Keep It Simple)

For every alert, capture:

  • detector_id
  • created_at
  • triage_outcome → {actionable | non_actionable}
  • triage_minutes
  • root_cause_tag → {tuning_needed, duplicate, asset_misclass, enrichment_gap, model_hallucination, rule_overlap}

 

Hourly roll-ups to your dashboard:

  • NAAH, NAR, MTTT (avg & P90)
  • Top 10 noisiest detectors by non-actionable volume and triage cost

 

This is enough to run the whole AQ-SLO loop without building a data lake first.

 

Operating Rhythm (SOC-wide, 45 Minutes/Week)

  1. Noise Review (20 min): Examine the Top 10 noisiest detectors → keep, fix, or kill.
  2. Tuning Queue (15 min): Assign PRs/changes for the 3 biggest contributors; set owners and due dates.
  3. Retro (10 min): Are we inside the budget? If not, apply the rollback rule. No exceptions.

 

Make it boring, repeatable, and visible. Tie it to team KPIs and vendor SLAs.

 

What to Measure per Detector/Model

  • Precision @ triage = actionable / total
  • NAAH contribution = non-actionables from this detector / analyst-hours
  • Triage cost = Σ triage_minutes
  • Kill-switch score = weighted blend of (precision↓, NAAH↑, triage cost↑)

 

Rank detectors by kill-switch score to drive your weekly agenda.

 

Formulas You Can Drop into a Sheet

NAAH = NON_ACTIONABLE_COUNT / ANALYST_HOURS

NAR% = (NON_ACTIONABLE_COUNT / TOTAL_ALERTS) * 100

MTTT = AVERAGE(TRIAGE_MINUTES)

MTTT_P90 = PERCENTILE(TRIAGE_MINUTES, 0.9)

ERROR_BUDGET_USED = max(0, (NAAH – SLO_NAAH) / SLO_NAAH)

 

These translate cleanly into Grafana, Kibana/ELK, BigQuery, or a simple spreadsheet.

 

Fast Implementation Plan (14 Days)

Day 1–3: Instrument triage outcomes and minutes in your case system. Add the root-cause tags above.

Day 4–10: Run all changes in shadow mode. Publish hourly NAAH/NAR/MTTT to a single dashboard.

Day 11: Freeze SLOs (start with ≤ 5 NAAH, ≤ 35% NAR).

Day 12–14: Turn on auto-rollback for any detector breaching budget.

 

If your platform supports feature flags, wrap detectors with a kill-switch. If not, document a manual rollback path and make it muscle memory.

 

SOC-Wide Incentives (Make It Stick)

  • Team KPI: % of days inside AQ-SLO (target ≥ 90%).
  • Engineering KPI: Time-to-fix for top noisy detectors (target ≤ 5 business days).
  • Vendor/Model SLA: Noise clauses—breach of AQ-SLO triggers fee credits or disablement.

 

This aligns incentives across analysts, engineers, and vendors—and keeps the pager honest.

 

Why AQ-SLOs Work (In Practice)

  1. Cuts alert fatigue and stabilizes on-call burdens.
  2. Reclaims 20–40% analyst time for hunts, purple-team work, and real incident response.
  3. Turns AI from hype to reliability: shadow-mode proof + rollback by budget makes “AI in the SOC” shippable.
  4. Improves organizational trust: leadership gets clear, comparable metrics for signal quality and human cost.

 

Common Pitfalls (and How to Avoid Them)

  • Chasing zero noise. You’ll starve detection coverage. Use realistic SLOs and iterate.
  • No root-cause tags. You can’t fix what you can’t name. Keep the tag set small and enforced.
  • Permissive shadow-mode. If it never ends, it’s not a gate. Time-box it and require uplift.
  • Skipping rollbacks. If you won’t revert noisy changes, your SLO is a wish, not a control.
  • Dashboard sprawl. One panel with NAAH, NAR, MTTT, and the Top 10 noisiest detectors is enough.

 

Policy Addendum (Drop-In Language You Can Adopt Today)

Alert-Quality SLO: The SOC shall maintain non-actionable alerts ≤ 5 per analyst-hour on a 14-day rolling window. New detectors (rules, models, enrichments) must pass a 7-day shadow-mode trial demonstrating NAAH ≤ 3 or ≥ 30% precision uplift with no P90 MTTT regressions. Detectors that breach the SLO on 3 of 7 days shall be disabled or rolled back pending tuning. Weekly noise-review and tuning queues are mandatory, with owners and due dates tracked in the case system.

 

Tune the numbers to fit your scale and risk tolerance, but keep the mechanics intact.

 

What This Looks Like in the SOC

  • An engineer proposes a new AI phishing detector.
  • It runs in shadow mode for 7 days, with precision measured at triage and NAAH tracked hourly.
  • It shows a 36% precision uplift vs. the current phishing rule set and no MTTT regression.
  • It ships behind a feature flag tied to the AQ-SLO budget.
  • Three days later, a vendor feed change spikes duplicate alerts. The budget breaches.
  • The feature flag kills the noisy path automatically, a ticket captures the post-mortem, and the tuning PR lands in 48 hours.
  • Analyst pager load stays stable; hunts continue on schedule.

 

That’s what operationalized AI looks like when noise is a first-class reliability concern.

 

Want Help Standing This Up?

MicroSolved has implemented AQ-SLOs and ship/rollback gates in SOCs of all sizes—from credit unions to automotive suppliers—across SIEMs, EDR/XDR, and AI-assisted detection stacks. We can help you:

  • Baseline your current noise profile (NAAH/NAR/MTTT)
  • Design your shadow-mode trials and acceptance gates
  • Build the dashboard and auto-rollback workflow
  • Align SLAs, KPIs, and vendor contracts to AQ-SLOs
  • Train your team to run the weekly operating rhythm

 

Get in touch: Visit microsolved.com/contact or email info@microsolved.com to talk with our team about piloting AQ-SLOs in your environment.

 

* AI tools were used as a research assistant for this content, but human moderation and writing are also included. The included images are AI-generated.

Daily Log Monitoring and Increased Third Party Security Responsibilities: Here They Come!

For years now we at MSI have extoled the security benefits of daily log monitoring and reciprocal security practices between primary and third party entities present on computer networks. It is constantly being proven true that security incidents could be prevented, or at least quickly detected, if system logs were properly monitored and interpreted. It is also true that many serious information security incidents are the result of cyber criminals compromising third party service provider systems to gain indirect access to private networks. 

I think that most large-network CISOs are well aware of these facts. So why aren’t these common security practices right now? The problem is that implementing effective log monitoring and third party security practices is plagued with difficulties. In fact, implementation has proven to be so difficult that organizations would rather suffer the security consequences than put these security controls in place. After all, it is cheaper and easier – usually – unless you are one of the companies that get pwned! Right now, organizations are gambling that they won’t be among the unfortunate – like Target. A fools’ paradise at best! 

But there are higher concerns in play here than mere money and efficiency. What really is at stake is the privacy and security of all the system users – which one way or another means each and every one of us. None of us likes to know our private financial or medical or personal information has been exposed to public scrutiny or compromise, not to mention identity theft and ruined credit ratings. And what about utilities and manufacturing concerns? Failure to implement the best security measures among power concerns, for example, can easily lead to real disasters and even loss of human life. Which all means that it behooves us to implement controls like effective monitoring and vendor security management. There is no doubt about it. Sooner or later we are going to have to bite the bullet. 

Unfortunately, private concerns are not going to change without prodding. That is where private and governmental regulatory bodies are going to come into play. They are going to have to force us to implement better information security. And it looks like one of the first steps in this process is being taken by the PCI Security Standards Council. Topics for their special interest group projects in 2015 are going to be daily log monitoring and shared security responsibilities for third party service providers.

That means that all those organizations out there that foster the use of or process credit cards are going to see new requirements in these fields in the next couple of years. Undoubtedly similar requirements for increased security measures will be seen in the governmental levels as well. So why wait until the last minute? If you start now implementing not only effective monitoring and 3rd party security, but other “best practices” security measures, it will be much less painful and more cost effective for you. You will also be helping us all by coming up with new ways to practically and effectively detect security incidents through system monitoring. How about increasing the use of low noise anomaly detectors such as honey pots? What about concentrating more on monitoring information leaving the network than what comes in? How about breaking massive networks into smaller parts that are easier monitor and secure? What ideas can you come up with to explore?

This post written by John Davis.

MSI Announces TigerTrax Reputational Threat Services

TigerTrax™ is MSI’s proprietary platform for gathering and analyzing data from the social media sphere and the overall web. This sophisticated platform, originally developed for threat intelligence purposes, provides the team with a unique capability to rapidly and effectively monitor the world’s data streams for potential points of interest.

 

The uses of the capability include social media code of conduct monitoring, rapid “deep dive” content gathering and analysis, social media investigations & forensics, organizational monitoring/research/profiling and, of course, threat intelligence.

 

The system is modular in nature, which allows MSI to create a number of “on demand” and managed services around the platform. Today the platform is in use in some of the following ways:

  • Sports teams are using the services to monitor professional athletes for potential code of conduct and brand damaging behaviors
  • Sports teams are also using the forensics aspects of the service to help defend their athletes against false behavior-related claims
  • Additionally, sports teams have begun to use the service for reputational analysis around trades/drafts, etc.
  • Financial organizations are using the service to monitor social media content for signs of illicit behavior or potential legal/regulatory violations
  • Talent agencies are monitoring their talent pools for content that could impact their public brands
  • Law firms are leveraging the service to identify potential issues with a given case and for investigation/forensics
  • Companies have begun to depend on the service for content monitoring during mergers and acquisitions activities, including quiet period monitoring and pre-offer intelligence
  • Many, many more uses of the platform are emerging every day

 If your organization has a need to understand or monitor the social media sphere and deep web content around an issue, a reputational concern or a code of conduct, discuss how TigerTrax from MSI can help meet your needs with an account executive today.

 

At a glance call outs:

  • Social media investigation/forensics and monitoring services
  • Customized to your specific concerns or code of conduct
  • Can provide deep dive background information or ongoing monitoring
  • Actionable reporting with direct support from MSI Analysts
  • Several pricing plans available

Key Differentiators:

  • Powerful, customizable, proprietary platform
  • Automated engines, bleeding edge analytics & human analysts to provide valuable insights
  • No web portal to learn or analytics software to configure and maintain
  • No heavy lifting on customers, MSI does the hard work, you get the results
  • Flexible reporting to meet your business needs