New Blog Post | Data Connectors for Azure Log Analytics and Data Explorer Now in Public Preview
Data Connectors for Azure Log Analytics and Data Explorer Now in Public Preview - Microsoft Community Hub The Microsoft Defender EASM (Defender EASM) team is excited to share that new Data Connectors for Azure Log Analytics and Azure Data Explorer are now available in public preview. Defender EASM continuously discovers an incredible amount of up-to-the-minute Attack Surface Data, so connecting and automating this data flow to all our customers’ mission-critical systems that keep their organizations secure is essential. The new Data Connectors for Log Analytics and Azure Data Explorer can easily augment existing workflows by automating recurring exports of all asset inventory data and the set of potential security issues flagged as insights to specified destinations to keep other tools continually updated with the latest findings from Defender EASM. Original Post: New Blog Post | Data Connectors for Azure Log Analytics and Data Explorer Now in Public Preview - Microsoft Community HubPlanning your move to Microsoft Defender portal for all Microsoft Sentinel customers
In November 2023, Microsoft announced our strategy to unify security operations by bringing the best of XDR and SIEM together. Our first step was bringing Microsoft Sentinel into the Microsoft Defender portal, giving teams a single, comprehensive view of incidents, reducing queue management, enriching threat intel, streamlining response and enabling SOC teams to take advantage of Gen AI in their day-to-day workflow. Since then, considerable progress has been made with thousands of customers using this new unified experience; to enhance the value customers gain when using Sentinel in the Defender portal, multi-tenancy and multi-workspace support was added to help customers with more sophisticated deployments. Our mission is to unify security operations by bringing all your data, workflows, and people together to unlock new capabilities and drive better security outcomes. As a strong example of this, last year we added extended posture management, delivering powerful posture insights to the SOC team. This integration helps build a closed-loop feedback system between your pre- and post-breach efforts. Exposure Management is just one example. By bringing everything together, we can take full advantage of AI and automation to shift from a reactive to predictive SOC that anticipates threats and proactively takes action to defend against them. Beyond Exposure Management, Microsoft has been constantly innovating in the Defender experience, adding not just SIEM but also Security Copilot. The Sentinel experience within the Defender portal is the focus of our innovation energy and where we will continue to add advanced Sentinel capabilities going forward. Onboarding to the new unified experience is easy and doesn’t require a typical migration. Just a few clicks and permissions. Customers can continue to use Sentinel in the Azure portal while it is available even after choosing to transition. Today, we’re announcing that we are moving to the next phase of the transition with a target to retire the Azure portal for Microsoft Sentinel by July 1, 2026. Customers not yet using the Defender portal should plan their transition accordingly. “Really amazing to see that coming, because cross querying with tables in one UI is really cool! Amazing, big step forward to the unified [Defender] portal.” Glueckkanja AG “The biggest benefit of a unified security operations solution (Microsoft Sentinel + Microsoft Defender XDR) has been the ability to combine data in Defender XDR with logs from third party security tools. Another advantage developed has been to eliminate the need to switch between Defender XDR and Microsoft Sentinel portals, now having a single pane of glass, which the team has been wanting for some years.” Robel Kidane, Group Information Security Manager, Renishaw PLC Delivering the SOC of the future Unifying threat protection, exposure management and security analytics capabilities in one pane of glass not only streamlines the user experience, but also enables Sentinel customers to realize security outcomes more efficiently: Analyst efficiency: A single portal reduces context switching, simplifies workflows, reduces training overhead, and improves team agility. Integrated insights: SOC-focused case management, threat intelligence, incident correlation, advanced hunting, exposure management, and a prioritized incident queue enriched with business and sensitivity context—enabling faster, more informed detection and response across all products. SOC optimization: Security controls that can be adjusted as threats and business priorities change to control costs and provide better coverage and utilization of data, thus maximizing ROI from the SIEM. Accelerated response: AI-driven detection and response which reduces mean time to respond (MTTR) by 30%, increases security response efficiency by 60%, and enables embedded Gen AI and agentic workflows. What’s next: Preparing for the retirement of the Sentinel Experience in the Azure Portal Microsoft is committed to supporting every single customer in making that transition over the next 12 months. Beginning July 1, 2026, Sentinel users will be automatically redirected to the Defender portal. After helping thousands of customers smoothly make the transition, we recommend that security teams begin planning their migration and change management now to ensure continuity and avoid disruption. While the technical process is very straightforward, we have found that early preparation allows time for workflow validation, training, and process alignment to take full advantage of the new capabilities and experience. Tips for a Successful Migration to Microsoft Defender 1. Leverage Microsoft’s help: Leverage Microsoft documentation, instructional videos, guidance, and in-product support to help you be successful. A good starting point is the documentation on Microsoft Learn. 2. Plan early: Engage stakeholders early including SOC and IT Security leads, MSSPs, and compliance teams to align on timing, training and organizational needs. Make sure you have an actionable timeline and agreement in the organization around when you can prioritize this transition to ensure access to the full potential of the new experience. 3. Prepare your environment: Plan and design your environment thoroughly. This includes understanding the prerequisites for onboarding Microsoft Sentinel workspaces, reviewing and deciding on access controls, and planning the architecture of your tenant and workspace. Proper planning will ensure a smooth transition and help avoid any disruptions to your security operations. 4. Leverage Advanced Threat Detection: The Defender portal offers enhanced threat detection capabilities with advanced AI and machine learning for Microsoft Sentinel. Make sure to leverage these features for faster and more accurate threat detection and response. This will help you identify and address critical threats promptly, improving your overall security posture. 5. Utilize Unified Hunting and Incident Management: Take advantage of the enhanced hunting, incident, and investigation capabilities in Microsoft Defender. This provides a comprehensive view for more efficient threat detection and response. By consolidating all security incidents, alerts, and investigations into a single unified interface, you can streamline your operations and improve efficiency. 6. Optimize Cost and Data Management The Defender portal offers cost and data optimization features, such as SOC Optimization and Summary Rules. Make sure to utilize these features to optimize your data management, reduce costs, and increase coverage and SIEM ROI. This will help you manage your security operations more effectively and efficiently. Unleash the full potential of your Security team The unified SecOps experience available in the Defender portal is designed to support the evolving needs of modern SOCs. The Defender portal is not just a new home for Microsoft Sentinel - it’s a foundation for integrated, AI-driven security operations. We’re committed to helping you make this transition smoothly and confidently. If you haven’t already joined the thousands of security organizations that have done so, now is the time to begin. Resources AI-Powered Security Operations Platform | Microsoft Security Microsoft Sentinel in the Microsoft Defender portal | Microsoft Learn Shifting your Microsoft Sentinel Environment to the Defender Portal | Microsoft Learn Microsoft Sentinel is now in Defender | YouTube
Introducing Microsoft Sentinel data lake
Today, we announced a significant expansion of Microsoft Sentinel’s capabilities through the introduction of Sentinel data lake, now rolling out in public preview. Security teams cannot defend what they cannot see and analyze. With exploding volumes of security data, organizations are struggling to manage costs while maintaining effective threat coverage. Do-it-yourself security data architectures have perpetuated data silos, which in turn have reduced the effectiveness of AI solutions in security operations. With Sentinel data lake, we are taking a major step to address these challenges. Microsoft Sentinel data lake enables a fully managed, cloud-native, data lake that is purposefully designed for security, right inside Sentinel. Built on a modern lake architecture and powered by Azure, Sentinel data lake simplifies security data management, eliminates security data silos, and enables cost-effective long-term security data retention with the ability to run multiple forms of analytics on a single copy of that data. Security teams can now store and manage all security data. This takes the market-leading capabilities of Sentinel SIEM and supercharges it even further. Customers can leverage the data lake for retroactive TI matching and hunting over a longer time horizon, track low and slow attacks, conduct forensics analysis, build anomaly insights, and meet reporting & compliance needs. By unifying security data, Sentinel data lake provides the AI ready data foundation for AI solutions. Let’s look at some of Sentinel data lake’s core features. Simplified onboarding and enablement inside Defender Portal: Customers can easily discover and enable the new data lake from within the Defender portal, either from the banner on the home page or from settings. Setting up a modern data lake now is just a click away, empowering security teams to get started quickly without a complex setup. Simplified security data management: Sentinel data lake works seamlessly with existing Sentinel connectors. It brings together security logs from Microsoft services across M365, Defender, Azure, Entra, Purview, Intune plus third-party sources like AWS, GCP, network and firewall data from 350+ connectors and solutions. The data lake supports Sentinel’s existing table schemas while customers can also create custom connectors to bring raw data into the data lake or transform it during ingestion. In the future, we will enable additional industry-standard schemas. The data lake expands beyond just activity logs by including a native asset store. Critical asset information is added to the data lake using new Sentinel data connectors for Microsoft 365, Entra, and Azure, enabling a single place to analyze activity and asset data enriched with Threat intelligence. A new table management experience makes it easy for customers to choose where to send and store data, as well as set related retention policies to optimize their security data estate. Customers can easily send critical, high-fidelity security data to the analytics tier or choose to send high-volume, low fidelity logs to the new data lake tier. Any data brought into the analytics tier is automatically mirrored into the data lake at no additional charge, making data lake the central location for all security data. Advanced data analysis capabilities over data in the data lake: Sentinel data lake stores all security data in an open format to enable analysts to do multi-modal security analytics on a single copy of data. Through the new data lake exploration experience in the Defender portal, customers can leverage Kusto query language to analyze historical data using the full power of Kusto. Since the data lake supports the Sentinel table schema, advanced hunting queries can be run directly on the data lake. Customers can also schedule long-running jobs, either once or on a schedule, that perform complex analysis on historical data for in-depth security insights. These insights generated from the data lake can be easily elevated to analytics tier and leveraged in Sentinel for threat investigation and response. Additionally, as part of the public preview, we are also releasing a new Sentinel Visual Studio Code extension that enables security teams to easily connect to the same data lake data and use Python notebooks, as well as spark and ML libraries to deeply analyze lake data for anomalies. Since the environment is fully managed, there is no compute infrastructure to set up. Customers can just install the Visual Studio Code extension and use AI coding agents like GitHub Copilot to build a notebook and execute it in the managed environment. These notebooks can also be scheduled as jobs and the resulting insights can be elevated to analytics tier and leveraged in Sentinel for threat investigation and response. Flexible business model: Sentinel data lake enables customers to separate their data ingestion and retention needs from their security analytics needs, allowing them to ingest and store data cost effectively and then pay separately when analyzing data for their specific needs. Let’s put this all together and show an example of how a customer can operationalize and derive value from the data lake for retrospective threat intelligence matching in Microsoft Sentinel. Network logs are typically high-volume logs but can often contain key insights for detecting initial entry point of an attack, command and control connection, lateral movement or an exfiltration attempt. Customers can now send these high-volume logs to the data lake tier. Next, they can create a python notebook that can join latest threat intelligence from Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence to scan network logs for any connections to/from a suspicious IP or domain. They can schedule this notebook to run as a scheduled job, and any insights can then be promoted to analytics tiers and leveraged to enrich ongoing investigation, hunts, response or forensics analysis. All this is possible cost-effectively without having to set up any complex infrastructure, enabling security teams to achieve deeper insights. This preview is now rolling out for customers in Defender portal in our supported regions. To learn more, check out our Mechanics video and our documentation or talk to your account teams. Get started today Join us as we redefine what’s possible in security operations: Onboard Sentinel data lake: https://aka.ms/sentineldatalakedocs Explore our pricing: https://aka.ms/sentinel/pricingblog For the supported regions, please refer to https://aka.ms/sentinel/datalake/geos Learn more about our MDTI news: http://aka.ms/mdti-convergence General Availability of Auxiliary Logs and Reduced PricingIdentify organizational use/misuse of sensitive information using Microsoft 365 and Sentinel
Have you ever wondered if your users commonly downgrade Sensitivity Labels just to share the content externally, or how much of your sensitive content is processed by risky devices or users. Where is it processed? What if you could do it with organizational context added?Introducing Microsoft Sentinel graph (Public Preview)
Security is being reengineered for the AI era—moving beyond static, rulebound controls and after-the-fact response toward platform-led, machine-speed defense. The challenge is clear: fragmented tools, sprawling signals, and legacy architectures that can’t match the velocity and scale of modern attacks. What’s needed is an AI-ready, data-first foundation—one that turns telemetry into a security graph, standardizes access for agents, and coordinates autonomous actions while keeping humans in command of strategy and high-impact investigations. Security teams already center operations on their SIEM for end-to-end visibility, and we’re advancing that foundation by evolving Microsoft Sentinel into both the SIEM and the platform for agentic defense—connecting analytics and context across ecosystems. And today, we announced the general availability of Sentinel data lake and introduced new preview platform capabilities that are built on Sentinel data lake (Figure 1), so protection accelerates to machine speed while analysts do their best work. We are excited to announce the public preview of Microsoft Sentinel graph, a deeply connected map of your digital estate across endpoints, cloud, email, identity, SaaS apps, and enriched with our threat intelligence. Sentinel graph, a core capability of the Sentinel platform, enables Defenders and Agentic AI to connect the dots and bring deep context quickly, enabling modern defense across pre-breach and post-breach. Starting today, we are delivering new graph-based analytics and interactive visualization capabilities across Microsoft Defender and Microsoft Purview. Attackers think in graphs. For a long time, defenders have been limited to querying and analyzing data in lists forcing them to think in silos. With Sentinel graph, Defenders and AI can quickly reveal relationships, traversable digital paths to understand blast radius, privilege escalation, and anomalies across large, cloud-scale data sets, deriving deep contextual insight across their digital estate, SOC teams and their AI Agents can stay proactive and resilient. With Sentinel graph-powered experiences in Defender and Purview, defenders can now reason over assets, identities, activities, and threat intelligence to accelerate detection, hunting, investigation, and response. Incident graph in Defender. The incident graph in the Microsoft Defender portal is now enriched with ability to analyze blast radius of the active attack. During an incident investigation, the blast radius analysis quickly evaluates and visualizes the vulnerable paths an attacker could take from a compromise entity to a critical asset. This allows SOC teams to effectively prioritize and focus their attack mitigation and response saving critical time and limiting impact. Hunting graph in Defender. Threat hunting often requires connecting disparate pieces of data to uncover hidden paths that attackers exploit to reach your crown jewels. With the new hunting graph, analysts can visually traverse the complex web of relationships between users, devices, and other entities to reveal privileged access paths to critical assets. This graph-powered exploration transforms threat hunting into a proactive mission, enabling SOC teams to surface vulnerabilities and intercept attacks before they gain momentum. This approach shifts security operations from reactive alert handling to proactive threat hunting, enabling teams to identify vulnerabilities and stop attacks before they escalate. Data risk graph in Purview Insider Risk Management (IRM). Investigating data leaks and insider risks is challenging when information is scattered across multiple sources. The data risk graph in IRM offers a unified view across SharePoint and OneDrive, connecting users, assets, and activities. Investigators can see not just what data was leaked, but also the full blast radius of risky user activity. This context helps data security teams triage alerts, understand the impact of incidents, and take targeted actions to prevent future leaks. Data risk graph in Purview Data Security Investigation (DSI). To truly understand a data breach, you need to follow the trail—tracking files and their activities across every tool and source. The data risk graph does this by automatically combining unified audit logs, Entra audit logs, and threat intelligence, providing an invaluable insight. With the power of the data risk graph, data security teams can pinpoint sensitive data access and movement, map potential exfiltration paths, and visualize the users and activities linked to risky files, all in one view. Getting started Microsoft Defender If you already have the Sentinel data lake, the required graph will be auto provisioned when you login into the Defender portal; hunting graph and incident graph experience will appear in the Defender portal. New to data lake? Use the Sentinel data lake onboarding flow to provision the data lake and graph. Microsoft Purview Follow the Sentinel data lake onboarding flow to provision the data lake and graph. In Purview Insider Risk Management (IRM), follow the instructions here. In Purview Data Security Investigation (DSI), follow the instructions here. Reference links Watch Microsoft Secure Microsoft Secure news blog Data lake blog MCP server blog ISV blog Security Store blog Copilot blog Microsoft Sentinel—AI-Powered Cloud SIEM | Microsoft Security
Microsoft Sentinel data lake pricing (preview)
This article describes the pricing for the new Microsoft Sentinel data lake billed components in preview. See What is Microsoft Sentinel data lake (preview) to learn more about the data lake, or the Microsoft Sentinel pricing page for an overview of Microsoft Sentinel pricing. Pricing Important The preview pricing below is provided in USD for reference only, based on pricing in the East US region and does not include taxes or currency adjustments. Preview pricing is subject to change, see terms described in our preview terms. Starting August 4, 2025, refer to the Microsoft Sentinel pricing page for current pricing within your relevant region. SKU Meter type Price Data lake ingestion Data Processed (GB) $0.05 Data processing Data Processed (GB) $0.10 Data lake storage Data Stored (GB/Month) $0.026 Data lake query Data Analyzed (GB) $0.005 Advanced data insights 1 Compute Hour $0.15 Notes Prices are estimates only and are not intended as actual price quotes. Actual pricing may vary depending on the type of agreement entered with Microsoft, date of purchase, the currency exchange rate and taxes which may be applicable. During preview, the data lake tier includes 30 days of free storage. Data processing in the data lake is also available at no cost during this time. For more information on these meters, see Data lake tier.Sentinel Watchlist Automation Using Logic Apps
Watchlists are data sources that you can refer to within your Sentinel workspace in queries, hunting rules, analytics rules, workbooks, and more. Automating the population of these watchlists enables you to use them for dynamically changing data, whilst still referring to the same watchlist in your detections.
