One of the first questions teams ask when evaluating Microsoft Sentinel is simple: what will this actually cost? Today, many customers and partners estimate Sentinel costs using the Azure Pricing Calculator, but it doesn’t provide the Sentinel-specific usage guidance needed to understand how each Sentinel meter contributes to overall spend. As a result, it can be hard to produce accurate, trustworthy estimates, especially early on, when you may not know every input upfront. To make these conversations easier and budgets more predictable, Microsoft is introducing the new Sentinel Cost Estimator (public preview) for Microsoft customers and partners.
The Sentinel Cost Estimator gives organizations better visibility into spend and more confidence in budgeting as they operate at scale.
You can access the Microsoft Sentinel Cost Estimator here: https://microsoft.com/en-us/security/pricing/microsoft-sentinel/cost-estimator
What the Sentinel Cost Estimator does
The new Sentinel Cost Estimator makes pricing transparent and predictable for Microsoft customers and partners. The Sentinel Cost Estimator helps you understand what drives costs at a meter level and ensures your estimates are accurate with step-by-step guidance.
You can model multi-year estimates with built-in projections for up to three years, making it easy to anticipate data growth, plan for future spend, and avoid budget surprises as your security operations mature. Estimates can be easily shared with finance and security teams to support better budgeting and planning.
When to Use the Sentinel Cost Estimator
Use the Sentinel Cost Estimator to:
- Model ingestion growth over time as new data sources are onboarded
- Explore tradeoffs between Analytics and Data Lake storage tiers
- Understand the impact of retention requirements on total spend
- Estimate compute usage for notebooks and advanced queries
- Project costs across a multi‑year deployment timeline
For broader Azure infrastructure cost planning, the Azure Pricing Calculator can still be used alongside the Sentinel Cost Estimator.
Cost Estimator Example
Let’s walk through a practical example using the Cost Estimator. A medium-sized company that is new to Microsoft Sentinel wants a high-level estimate of expected costs. In their previous SIEM, they performed proactive threat hunting across identity, endpoint, and network logs; ran detections on high-security-value data sources from multiple vendors; built a small set of dashboards; and required three years of retention for compliance and audit purposes. Based on their prior SIEM, they estimate they currently ingest about 2 TB per day.
In the Cost Estimator, they select their region and enter their daily ingestion volume. As they are not currently using Sentinel data lake, they can explore different ways of splitting ingestion between tiers to understand the potential cost benefit of using the data lake.
Their retention requirement is three years. If they choose to use Sentinel data lake, they can plan to retain 90 days in the Analytics tier (included with Microsoft Sentinel) and keep the remaining data in Sentinel data lake for the full three years.
As notebooks are new to them, they plan to evaluate notebooks for SOC workflows and graph building. They expect to start in the light usage tier and may move to medium as they mature. Since they occasionally query data older than 90 days to build trends—and anticipate using the Sentinel MCP server for SOC workflows on Sentinel lake data—they expect to start in the medium query volume tier.
Note: These tiers are for estimation purposes only; they do not lock in pricing when using the Microsoft Sentinel platform.
Because this customer is upgrading from Microsoft 365 E3 to E5, they may be eligible for free ingestion based on their user count. Combined with their eligible server data from Defender for Servers, this can reduce their billable ingestion.
In the review step, the Cost Estimator projects costs across a three-year window and breaks down drivers such as data tiers, commitment tiers, and comparisons with alternative storage options. From there, the customer can go back to earlier steps to adjust inputs and explore different scenarios. Once done, the estimate report can be exported for reference with Microsoft representatives and internal leadership when discussing the deployment of Microsoft Sentinel and Sentinel Platform.
Finalize Your Estimate with Microsoft
The Microsoft Sentinel Cost Estimator is designed to provide directional guidance and help organizations understand how architectural decisions may influence cost. Final pricing may vary based on factors such as deployment architecture, commitment tiers, and applicable discounts. We recommend working with your Microsoft account team or a Security sales specialist to develop a formal proposal tailored to your organization’s requirements.
Try the Microsoft Sentinel Cost Estimator
Start building your Microsoft Sentinel cost estimate today: https://microsoft.com/en-us/security/pricing/microsoft-sentinel/cost-estimator.
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