Migrating from one SIEM to another is a critical decision—and often one of the hardest to execute. Legacy SIEM migrations are complex, resource-heavy, and time-consuming, often taking up to 15 months with extensive manual effort and cross-team coordination. Organizations face hurdles like multi-phased processes, translating and validating hundreds of detection rules, mapping diverse data sources, and maintaining operational continuity. These challenges have historically slowed cloud adoption and driven up migration costs.
At Ignite 2025, we unveiled the new AI-powered SIEM migration experience, starting with Splunk support. Today, Microsoft is excited to announce support for QRadar in public preview. The tool goes beyond basic syntax translation with intent-based mapping for superior coverage and continuous optimization—delivering a future-ready SOC with advanced correlation and insights.
- Fater time to value: AI-powered tool analyzes uploaded legacy SIEM data, matches techniques and rules to OOTB Sentinel detections, and suggests missing connectors to ensure complete coverage
- Modernize your SOC at scale: Drive true SOC transformation with advanced correlation and coverage insights aligned with MITRE ATT&CK framework* (coming soon) , ensuring a future-ready SOC and continuous optimization
- Free migration support: Eligible customers receive expert hands-on assistance through the Cloud Accelerate Factory Program to quickly deploy Sentinel and migrate from Splunk and QRadar alongside their preferred partner
Early adopters report faster, streamlined migrations to Microsoft Sentinel—with deeper visibility into migration progress. This guided, automated experience simplifies a traditionally time-consuming process and reduces migration time by up to 50%, helping security teams realize value faster.
Four pillars of the AI-powered SIEM migration experience
To ensure a seamless transition and maximize the benefits of Microsoft Sentinel, the new SIEM migration experience is built around four foundational pillars. Each pillar addresses a critical stage of the migration journey, helping security teams move from assessment to operational excellence with clarity and confidence.
- Discovery & Planning: Identify origin SIEM detections and plan a phased migration using guided, trackable use-cases.
- Detections: Identify, match, recommend, finetune and enable detections available in Sentinel OOTB to recreate and exceed origin SIEM threats detection coverage.
- Data Sources: Identify, match and recommend enablement of data connectors based on recommended detections and similar customers data connectors usage.
- Holistic end-to-end SOC Engineer Experience: Provide a comprehensive, phased onboarding and migration process with progress tracking, onboarding targets, and SOC optimization enhancements.
How to use the new AI-Powered SIEM Migration Experience?
Step 1: Discover your existing SIEM environment automatically
The SIEM Migration experience starts by helping teams discover and analyze their existing SIEM environment, including detections and data sources. Instead of relying on manual analysis and spreadsheets, the experience ingests exported configurations and builds an actionable inventory.
This discovery phase establishes a reliable foundation for planning and eliminates one of the most error‑prone steps in traditional SIEM migrations.
Step 2: Review the migration recommendations generation progress
The next step is to evaluate the progress and outcomes of the migration recommendations generated by the AI-powered experience. This analysis provides visibility into the quality and completeness of the recommendations, ensuring teams can make informed decisions before moving forward.
By reviewing the status, teams can validate that all critical detections have been accounted for, identify any gaps, and prepare for a smooth transition to guided migration planning. This proactive assessment reduces surprises and builds confidence as the migration journey continues.
Step 3: Plan and track a guided, use‑case‑based migration
SIEM migrations are not one‑time events—they’re phased journeys. The new experience provides a stateful, guided migration plan aligned to Sentinel solutions and SOC use cases, allowing teams to move gradually and confidently.
Teams can track progress, prioritize work, and collaborate across stakeholders with full transparency throughout the migration lifecycle.
Step 4: Match and enable Microsoft Sentinel detections with confidence
One of the most challenging aspects of SIEM migration is recreating detection coverage. The new experience uses AI‑assisted analysis to match existing SIEM detections to Microsoft Sentinel analytics rules, highlighting supported mappings and gaps clearly.
By focusing on high‑confidence, maintainable mappings, the experience helps teams migrate faster while building trust in the outcome.
Step 5: Identify and enable required data connectors
Detections are only effective when the right data is connected. The SIEM Migration experience automatically identifies and recommends the data connectors required to activate selected analytics rules, removing guesswork from onboarding.
This ensures that teams enable the right data sources at the right time, supporting both coverage and cost‑efficient ingestion.
Step 6: Track progress and optimize your SOC continuously
Beyond migration, the experience integrates with SOC Optimization to provide a unified view of migration progress alongside ongoing optimization recommendations.
This helps organizations move seamlessly from migration into continuous improvement, maximizing the value of Microsoft Sentinel and Defender XDR together.
Built with Security Copilot—at No Additional Cost
The SIEM Migration experience is powered by Security Copilot, bringing AI-assisted reasoning directly into the migration workflow.
While Security Copilot must be enabled in your tenant, the migration experience itself does not consume Security Compute Units (SCUs), so customers can use it without incurring additional costs.
Proven impact in preview
During private preview and early customer engagements, the new experience has demonstrated:
- Significantly higher detection match rates compared to previous tools
- Improved accuracy and trust through conservative, high‑confidence recommendations
- Reduced onboarding timelines—by months, not weeks
Customer feedback consistently highlights how the experience makes complex migrations more approachable, more transparent, and easier to plan and execute.
Getting Started
To start using the new SIEM Migration experience:
- Ensure Microsoft Sentinel is enabled in the Microsoft Defender portal
- Enable Security Copilot in your tenant
- Navigate to SOC Optimization → Set up your new SIEM
- Upload your Splunk or QRadar exported SIEM configuration data and follow the guided experience
Learn more in the official documentation:
Use the SIEM migration experience - Microsoft Sentinel
Want to Learn More?
Join us on Monday, February 2, 2026 | 9:00AM – 10:00AM (PT, Redmond Time) for an insightful webinar to discover how Microsoft Sentinel simplifies SIEM migrations and enables true SOC transformation.
Register today.
Share Your Feedback
If you have feedback or want to share your migration experience, we’d love to hear from you in the comments below.
— The Microsoft Sentinel team
Microsoft