Manage all your Microsoft Sentinel data in one place with Unified Data Management (Public Preview)
As security teams bring in more data from more sources and use it across SIEM and XDR workflows, decisions about connector health, ingestion volume, and cost optimization get harder. Today, we’re announcing the public preview of Unified Data Management for Microsoft Sentinel, available in the new Data & connectors experience in the Microsoft Defender portal, so you can monitor and manage your data from a single place. What Unified Data Management is and why it matters Unified Data Management brings connectors, tables, and ingestion health together. Instead of moving between separate pages, you can see your full data landscape, spot issues, and act on them from one view. It’s designed to help you quickly answer questions like: Which connectors are configured and which need attention? Which tables are receiving data? Are there ingestion spikes, drops, or stale data patterns? Which tables drive the most ingestion volume? What schema, transformations, and retention settings apply to a table? You’ll find it under Setup & configuration > Data & connectors, organized into three tabs: Overview, Connectors, and Tables. Overview: See health at a glance The Overview tab gives you a workspace-level snapshot of ingestion and health, so you can catch data issues before they impact analytics, detections, investigations, or reporting. It surfaces: Ingestion volume: Daily ingestion split by Analytics tier and Data Lake tier for your selected time range. Connectors that need attention: Connectors with credential errors, ingestion failures, or outages, including error type, failure count, and last successful ingestion. Table ingestion fluctuations: Tables with unexpected volume changes, grouped into spikes and drops. Data ingestion volume by table: Your top ingesting tables, ranked by daily volume. Ingestion latency by table: How long it takes for data to become available after it’s generated. Together, these insights help you troubleshoot connector failures, track down cost spikes, validate that new connectors are flowing, and catch unexpected changes in volume. Figure 1: The Overview tab shows daily ingestion volume by tier alongside data health insights, including connectors that need attention and tables with unexpected volume spikes or drops. Connectors: One inventory for unified and classic connectors The Connectors tab puts unified data connectors and Sentinel classic data connectors side by side, so it’s easier to see which data sources are onboarded and how they're connected. From here, you can: View onboarded connectors with their status, provider, content source, and available updates. Switch between unified connectors and Sentinel classic connectors. Search and filter connectors by provider, data type, and status. Open connector details to review configuration and health. Unified connectors reduce duplication by allowing supported data sources to connect once and feed data across Microsoft security products. Sentinel classic connectors continue to support the broad connector ecosystem, including connectors built with the Codeless Connector Framework (CCF). Figure 2: The Connectors tab brings unified and Sentinel classic connectors into a single inventory, with counts for onboarded and connected connectors, available updates, and filters for provider, data type, and status. Tables: Health, schema, transformations, and retention in one place The Tables tab brings Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Defender XDR tables together with their health signals, schema, transformations, and retention settings. Key insights now appear right in the grid, so you can compare tables side by side: last data received, average daily ingestion volume, estimated daily ingestion cost, volume anomaly, tier, and retention settings. This makes it easier to spot tables that have gone stale, are growing unexpectedly, or are driving a big share of your ingestion volume. Select any table to open the details panel, which organizes everything about that table into tabs: Details panel tab What it shows Overview Table type, tier, analytics retention, total retention, and other table metadata. Schema Column names, data types, and descriptions, with no KQL query required. Transformations Filter, Split, and Scope Tag transformation rules applied to the table. Retention Analytics retention and total retention settings. Figure 3: The Tables tab opens a details panel for any selected table. The Schema tab is especially useful when you need to understand incoming data, validate table fields, or create transformation logic without first writing schema-discovery queries. Built for everyday data operations in the Microsoft Defender portal Data management touches nearly every part of security operations, from detection and investigation to hunting, retention, and cost optimization. By bringing these tasks into the Microsoft Defender portal, Unified Data Management cuts down on context switching and makes it clearer how connectors, tables, health, transformations, and retention fit together. It’s one more step in Microsoft Sentinel’s investment in a unified security operations experience, where SIEM and XDR data can be managed and used together. Preview availability and prerequisites Unified Data Management is now available in public preview in commercial cloud environments. To experience it, you’ll need: Microsoft Sentinel onboarded to the Microsoft Defender portal. Unified role-based access control (URBAC) enabled in the Microsoft Defender portal. Data (manage) permission in the Data Operations permission group. Workspace permissions equivalent to Log Analytics Contributor, including permissions to write workspace and table settings. Get started Ready to try it? Open the Microsoft Defender portal and go to Setup & configuration > Data & connectors. From there: Start on the Overview tab to check ingestion volume and data health. Use the Connectors tab to view your unified and classic connectors. Explore the Tables tab to review table health, schema, transformations, and retention. For implementation and configuration guidance, see: Manage data in Microsoft Sentinel and Defender Configure data connectors Manage your existing tables and data Monitor the health of your Microsoft Sentinel data connectors Unified connectors overview Microsoft Sentinel data connectors More Microsoft Sentinel data integration news Public Preview: Nested API Support Comes to Microsoft Sentinel CCF Create a pull codeless connector for Microsoft Sentinel Logs Ingestion API in Azure Monitor
Expanded cross-tenant delegated access in Microsoft Defender is generally available
Security operations rarely stop at a single tenant boundary. Managed security service providers (MSSPs) protect many customer environments, and central security teams often operate across a tenant estate spanning business units, regions, or subsidiaries. In both cases, teams need to delegate security work without granting broad access or managing permissions one analyst at a time. Today, we’re announcing the general availability of cross-tenant delegated administration in Microsoft Defender, built on the same governance relationship model as Microsoft Entra Tenant Governance. Organizations can now use a consistent governance model to establish cross-tenant relationships, delegate access to partner or central security teams, and enforce least-privilege permissions across their tenant estate. We’re also extending delegated access to support Microsoft Sentinel resources and enabling granular permissions for delegated users through Defender unified RBAC, reducing the need for separate access models across identity and security. With the consistent access model, MSSPs partners (non-CSP) and multitenant organizations can run security operations across tenants, while each customer or governed tenant decides exactly what access to grant. Govern access across your tenant estate Microsoft Entra Tenant Governance helps organizations establish least-privilege governance relationships across related tenants. The same governance relationship model now extends into Microsoft Defender and Sentinel, enabling MSSPs and central security teams to manage security operations across governed environments without requiring separate local administrator identities in each tenant. This model helps organizations: Scale without multiplying identities. Analysts use their home-tenant accounts instead of requiring local administrator or Microsoft Entra B2B guest accounts in every governed tenant. Apply least privilege. Each governed tenant controls the roles and resource scopes assigned to remote tenant groups. Simplify ongoing administration. The partner or central team keeps access current by managing membership in its own security groups rather than maintaining individual assignments across customer tenants. Support integrated security operations. MSSPs and multitenant organizations can use a consistent governance relationship to support delegated operations across Microsoft Defender and Sentinel. Bring identity and security access together. Use a consistent governance relationship model across Microsoft Entra, Defender, and Sentinel, reducing the need for separate delegated-access arrangements. One relationship, two controls A governance relationship is a directional connection between two Microsoft Entra tenants: The governing tenant is where the MSSP or central security team manages its analysts and security groups. The governed tenant is the customer or organizational tenant that grants delegated access. After the relationship is approved, selected security groups from the governing tenant are represented in the governed tenant as remote tenant groups. The governed tenant can then assign the supported roles and resource scopes those groups need, while the governing tenant continues to manage group membership. This creates a clear separation of responsibilities: tenant administrators set the access boundaries in the governed tenant, and partners or central security teams manage their analysts within those boundaries. How the relationship works The governance relationship is established through a three-step, consent-based handshake: The governed tenant sends an invitation. A customer or organizational administrator enables governance invitations in Microsoft Defender and invites the governing tenant. The governing tenant sends the relationship request. The MSSP or central security team creates an access template containing the relevant security groups and Microsoft Entra role assignments, then sends the governance relationship request. The governed tenant approves the request and assigns roles and resource scopes. The governed tenant explicitly approves the governance relationship and configures the Defender and Sentinel roles and resource scopes granted to the remote tenant groups. With approval and permissions in place, the governance relationship is ready to be used. Figure 1: The governed tenant reviews the requested role assignments and retains final approval over delegated access. The relationship provides the cross-tenant foundation. Governed-tenant administrators then apply the workload and resource permissions required for the intended security operations: For Microsoft Defender: Administrators can assign supported Microsoft Defender unified RBAC roles to remote tenant groups, including custom roles with the permissions and scopes required for the work. For Microsoft Sentinel: Customers can manage delegated access using Defender unified RBAC or Azure RBAC, assigning remote tenant groups the permissions needed to operate customer environments with least privilege. Figure 2: Assign custom roles to a remote tenant group using Defender unified RBAC. This distinction allows each governed tenant to approve the relationship and right-size access for its own environment while the governing tenant manages the analysts who perform the work. What partners are saying Partners are seeing how expanded support for delegated access can simplify cross-tenant operations and help them deliver managed security services with least privilege. “The ability to assign Azure RBAC and Defender Unified RBAC to remote tenant groups over GDAP will allow us to securely and efficiently configure and access customer environments at scale. Historically, we would need to configure a range of different access methods to access all the different services, but now we can use GDAP to access everything we need to provide managed SOC services.” — Riley Boon, Senior Capability Engineer, CyberCX “Microsoft's investments in its partner programs pay off in real outcomes for the products BlueVoyant and our customers rely on every day. Over the past several months, Microsoft has worked alongside BlueVoyant to address limitations in Granular Delegated Admin Privileges (GDAP) and deliver new capabilities, including support for assigning GDAP security groups to Sentinel workspace roles and Unified Role-Based Access Control (URBAC) support for GDAP remote tenant groups. These improvements let us manage customer environments with least-privilege access. That is what customers have been asking for and Microsoft listened.” — Ryan Sturm, Senior Manager – Microsoft Security Engineering, BlueVoyant Whether you’re onboarding your first customer tenant or consolidating access across dozens, the same model applies: tenant administrators set the boundaries, and your team works within them. Get started Start with the work your partner or central security team needs to do. Identify the eligible security groups, establish the governance relationship, and assign only the workload roles and scopes that work requires. Configure delegated access with governance relationships for multitenant organizations Manage unified role-based access control in multitenant management Create custom roles with Microsoft Defender unified RBAC Additional resources Microsoft Entra tenant governance documentationIntroducing the Microsoft Sentinel ASIM EmailEvent schema
Email remains one of the most common entry points for security threats. Yet email products often describe the same activity with different table names, fields, and values. This makes it harder to build detections and investigations that work consistently across data sources. The Microsoft Sentinel Advanced Security Information Model, or ASIM, EmailEvent schema is now available. It provides a common structure for email delivery and inspection events, helping customers and partners create security content that works across supported email data sources. A consistent view of email security activity EmailEvent standardizes the information analysts need to understand what happened to an email and why. It covers: Email delivery and inspection events Sender, source, and recipient information Message subject, size, direction, and delivery location URLs and file attachments SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication results Delivery actions such as delivered, blocked, quarantined, or deleted Threat, risk, confidence, tactic, technique, and remediation details Instead of learning a different data model for every product, analysts can query the normalized EmailEvent fields. Parser developers map each source's native data to the same schema. How it works Consider an email that contains a suspicious attachment. The email security product records the sender, recipients, attachment, authentication results, inspection verdict, and final action. A connector collects that event. A parser or Data Collection Rule maps the source fields to EmailEvent. Microsoft Sentinel can then query the normalized record using the same field names used for other supported email sources. This common structure separates security content from the details of a specific product. When another source adds an EmailEvent parser, existing source-independent queries and detections can work with that source without being rewritten around its native field names. Why it matters Simpler analytics: Write queries against one consistent set of email fields. Broader coverage: Apply source-independent security content across normalized email sources. Faster investigations: Compare delivery, authentication, attachment, URL, and threat details without translating different data models. Easier integration: Give connector and parser developers a defined contract for bringing new email telemetry into ASIM. EmailEvent does not replace the rich native data produced by email security products. It provides a consistent security layer that makes that data easier to use together. Build on EmailEvent The EmailEvent release includes the schema definition, source-independent parser framework, filtering parser, deployment templates, and validation support in the Azure-Sentinel repository. The schema version is 1.0.0. Customers can use normalized EmailEvent data to develop hunting queries, analytics rules, workbooks, and investigation experiences. Partners and community contributors can create source-specific parsers that map their email data to the schema. Get started Normalization Email Schema MS Learn Learn about normalization and ASIM Explore the EmailEvent implementation in Azure-Sentinel Deploy ASIM parsers Thank you to the ASIM engineering and partner teams who contributed to the schema, deployment path, validation, and release.What’s new in Microsoft Sentinel: September 2026
Welcome back to What's new in Microsoft Sentinel. In September, Case Management brings investigation and collaboration together in Microsoft Defender, with a shared workspace to track work through resolution. Defender unified RBAC custom roles for granular delegated admin privileges (GDAP) give you finer control over what managed security service providers (MSSPs) and other partners can access. In Sentinel data lake, a single Codeless Connector Framework (CCF) connector can bring in data from many accounts, and our connector catalog has passed 500 data connectors. Read on for the details. Sentinel innovations: Sentinel SIEM Sentinel data lake Sentinel SIEM Case Management (Public Preview) Starting September 23, 2026, Case Management brings investigation and collaboration together in one experience in Defender. With Incident Cases, you can investigate, coordinate response, assign work, capture notes, and track progress through resolution, all from a shared workspace that holds investigation context alongside tasks and workflow tracking. Your existing Sentinel automation, playbooks, workbooks, and integrations carry over unchanged. This builds on the integrated security operations (ISOC) vision of bringing the context and workflows practitioners need to investigate and respond together in Defender. Read our Case Management blog, see the documentation, and watch the demo to learn more. Unified RBAC custom roles (Public Preview) If you work with a managed security service provider (MSSP) or manage multiple tenants, giving partners the right level of access is simpler. Granular delegated admin privileges (GDAP) sets which partner groups can be delegated access to your tenant, and Defender unified role-based access control (RBAC) sets what they can see and do once delegated. You can assign unified RBAC custom roles to GDAP remote tenant groups and scope each role down to specific security products, data sources, and data collections so partners receive only the access they need. GDAP previously only supported Microsoft Entra directory roles, which often meant handing partners more access than the job needed. Anyone who is a member of a remote tenant group receives its permissions. Your partner manages who belongs to the group, while you keep control of the role and its scope. Learn more. Sentinel data lake Multi-account support for codeless connectors (Public Preview) A single connector built on the Codeless Connector Framework (CCF) can bring data from many accounts, tenants, or environments into one Sentinel workspace. A unified connections list shows each account as its own row, labeled so you can tell them apart by account name, tenant ID, or environment. An “Add connection” experience walks you through setting up each one, and an independent lifecycle per connection means you can edit or remove any account without affecting the rest. Shared, efficient ingestion sends all of it to the same table, so you have one place to investigate instead of a separate connector for every account. This helps if you run separate production and development accounts, segment by region or business unit, or manage several customers in one workspace. Learn more. Sentinel data connectors pass the 500 mark Sentinel has reached an exciting milestone of more than 500 data connectors. Our connectors bring security signals from Microsoft services, non-Microsoft solutions, multicloud environments, applications, infrastructure, and custom sources into Sentinel, where they can be correlated and analyzed to help teams detect threats, investigate incidents, hunt across their digital estate, and automate response. With 500+ connectors and growing, Sentinel makes it easier for organizations to unify their security ecosystem and give the security operations center (SOC) broader visibility where it matters most. Find your connector. Additional resources Blogs and documentation: Integrated Security Operations Center in Microsoft Defender ISOC in Microsoft Defender (preview) Activate Microsoft Defender unified role-based access control (URBAC) Support multiple connections in a codeless connector Upcoming webinars: Oct 6: Security Immersion Event: Into the Breach Oct 14: Microsoft Security Immersion Event: Shadow Hunter Upcoming events: Oct 19: Microsoft Security Days Summit: Dallas Edition (In Person) ISOC: What's new with the Defenders Capture the Flag: Agent Wars (Hands-on) Nov 17–20: Microsoft Ignite at Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA, USA. See what's next in Microsoft Security. Register now. Stay connected Check back each month for the latest innovations, updates, and events to ensure you’re getting the most out of Microsoft Sentinel. We’ll see you in the next edition!Integrating Fluent Bit with Microsoft Sentinel
This guide will walk you through the steps required to integrate Fluent Bit with Microsoft Sentinel. Beware that in this article, we assume you already have a Sentinel workspace, a Data Collection Endpoint and a Data Collection Rule, an Entra ID application and finally a Fluent Bit installation. As mentioned above, log ingestion API supports ingestion both in custom tables as built-in tables, like CommonSecurityLog, Syslog, WindowsEvent and more. In case you need to check which tables are supported please the following article: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/logs/logs-ingestion-api-overview#supported-tables Prerequisites: Before beginning the integration process, ensure you have the following: An active Azure subscription with Microsoft Sentinel enabled; Microsoft Entra ID Application taking note of the ClientID, TenantID and Client Secret – create one check this article: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/identity-platform/quickstart-register-app?tabs=certificate A Data Collection Endpoint (DCE) – to create a data collection endpoint, please check this article: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/essentials/data-collection-endpoint-overview?tabs=portal A Data Collection Rule (DCR) – fields from the Data Collection Rule need to match exactly to what exists in table columns and also the fields from the log source. To create a DCR please check this article: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/essentials/data-collection-rule-create-edit?tabs=cli Depending on the source, it might require a custom table to be created or an existing table from log analytics workspace; Fluent Bit installed on your server or container – In case you haven’t yet installed Fluent Bit, in the following article you'll find the instructions per type of operating system: https://docs.fluentbit.io/manual/installation/getting-started-with-fluent-bit High level architecture: Step 1: Setting up Fluent Big configuration file Before we step-in into the configuration, Fluent Bit has innumerous output plugins and one of those is through Log Analytics Ingestion API both to supported Sentinel tables but also for custom tables. You can check more information about it here in Fluent Bit documentation: https://docs.fluentbit.io/manual/pipeline/outputs/azure_logs_ingestion Moving forwarder, in order to configure Fluent Bit to send logs into Sentinel log analytics workspace, please take note of the specific input plugin you are using or intend to use to receive logs and how can you use it to output the logs to Sentinel workspace. For example most of the Fluent Bit plugins allow to set a “tag” key which can be used within the output plugin so that there’s a match in which logs are intended to send. On the other hand, in a scenario where multiple input plugins are used and all are required send logs to Sentinel, then a match of type wildcard "*" could be used as well. Another example, in a scenario where there are multiple input plugins of type “HTTP” and you want to just send a specific one into Sentinel, then the “match” field must be set according to the position of the required input plugin, for example “match http.2”, if the input plugin would the 3 rd in the list of HTTP inputs. If nothing is specified in the "match" field, then it will assume "http.0" by default. For better understanding, here’s an example of how a Fluent Bit config file could look: First, the configuration file is located under the path ”/etc/fluent-bit/fluent-bit.conf” The first part is the definition of all “input plugins”, then follows the “filter plugins” which you can use for example to rename fields from the source to match for what exists within the data collection rule schema and Sentinel table columns and finally there’s the output plugins. Below is a screenshot of a sample config file: INPUT plugins section: In this example we’re going to use the “dummy input” to send sample messages to Sentinel. However, in your scenario you could leverage other’s input plugins within the same config file. After everything is configured in the input section, make sure to complete the “FILTER” section if needed, and then move forward to the output plugin section, screenshot below. OUTPUT plugins section: In this section, we have output plugins to write on a local file based on two tags “dummy.log” and “logger”, an output plugin that prints the outputs in json format and the output plugin responsible for sending data to Microsoft Sentinel. As you can see, this one is matching the “tag” for “dummy.log” where we’ve setup the message “{“Message”:”this is a sample message for testing fluent bit integration to Sentinel”, “Activity”:”fluent bit dummy input plugn”, “DeviceVendor”:”Ubuntu”}. Make sure you insert the correct parameters in the output plugin, in this scenario the "azure_logs_ingestion" plugin. Step 2: Fire Up Fluent Bit When the file is ready to be tested please execute the following: sudo /opt/fluent-bit/bin/fluent-bit -c /etc/fluent-bit/fluent-bit.conf Fluent bit will start initialization all the plugins it has under the config file. Then you’re access token should be retrieved if everything is well setup under the output plugin (app registration details, data collection endpoint URL, data collection rule id, sentinel table and important to make sure the name of the output plugin is actually “azure_logs_ingestion”). In a couple of minutes you should see this data under your Microsoft Sentinel table, either an existing table or a custom table created for the specific log source purpose. Summary Integrating Fluent Bit with Microsoft Sentinel provides a powerful solution for log collection and analysis. By following this guide, hope you can set up a seamless integration that enhances your organization's ability to monitor and respond to security threats, just carefully ensure that all fields processed in Fluent Bit are mapped exactly to the fields in Data Collection Rule and Sentinel table within Log Analytics Workspace. Special thanks to “Bindiya Priyadarshini” that collaborated with me on this blog post. Cheers!
Building Microsoft Sentinel Connectors in Minutes with the Sentinel Connector Builder Agent
Overview We previously announced the public preview of the Microsoft Sentinel connector builder agent via VS code extension, that helps developers build Microsoft Sentinel codeless connectors faster with low-code and AI-assisted prompts. This post walks through a hands-on lab using a mock Network Log API to demonstrate how the Sentinel connector builder agent simplifies building Codeless Connector Framework (CCF) pull connectors. Instead of manually creating ingestion infrastructure and configuration files, you’ll use a guided, conversational workflow in VS Code to generate connector artifacts, test them against a live API, and deploy them into Microsoft Sentinel. The lab focuses on the end-to-end experience ranging from API setup to validated connector deployment so you can see how quickly a working integration can be produced. For additional guidance beyond this lab, refer to our MS Learn documentation. The Lab Environment This lab is built around a mock Network Log API hosted as an Azure Function App. The purpose of the lab environment is to give us a live API that we can use to build, validate, and test the Sentinel CCF connector builder agent against end to end. The API exposes 50 synthetic network activity records that look and behave like a real product data source, including web traffic, DNS requests, blocked remote access attempts, malware command-and-control blocks, VPN activity, and other common network events. That makes it a useful stand-in for the type of telemetry many teams want to onboard into Microsoft Sentinel. The API is intentionally shaped like the kind of source a customer might expose for telemetry retrieval. It uses API key authentication through the X-API-Key header, returns paginated results through a nextLink model, and provides a predictable response structure that the builder agent can map into a pull connector configuration. The repo contains everything needed for the walkthrough. There is an ARM template to deploy the Function App, reference documentation for the API, and a sample connector package showing the generated polling config, table schema, DCR, and connector definition. The end goal of the lab is straightforward: use the builder agent to generate a CCF pull connector that ingests this API into the custom NetworkLogAPIGetNetworkLogs_CL table in Sentinel. Prerequisites Before starting, make sure you have the following: Azure subscription -- with Contributor access on a resource group (for deploying the Function App) and Microsoft Sentinel Contributor access on a Sentinel-enabled workspace (for deploying the connector) Microsoft Sentinel workspace -- an existing Log Analytics workspace with Sentinel enabled. See Onboard Microsoft Sentinel to a Log Analytics workspace for more information. Azure CLI -- See How to install the Azure CLI for more information. VS Code with the Microsoft Sentinel for Visual Studio Code extension installed. GitHub Copilot -- with access to premium models. The connector builder agent requires Claude Sonnet 4.5 or 4.6, which uses Copilot premium model credits. Lab Repository -- Once the aforementioned prerequisites are met, you can access the lab repository here: Azure-Sentinel/Tools/CCF-Connector-Builder-Agent-Accelerator at master · Azure/Azure-Sentinel Deploying the Mock API The full CLI commands for this section are available in the repo. For a simpler option, you can use GitHub Copilot to handle the deployment. Enter this prompt: Follow the deployment instructions in Sentinel-CCF-Pull-Connector-Builder-Agent-Accelerator/agent-instructions.md. Let’s deploy the Network Log API and build a CCF pull connector. At a high level, the setup is four steps: clone the repo, create a resource group, ensure you have a Sentinel-enabled workspace, and deploy the Function App using the included ARM template. The template takes two parameters: an ApiKey of your choice (the secret the CCF connector will use to authenticate) and your Log Analytics workspace resource ID for Application Insights. Deployment takes about two to three minutes and outputs the FunctionAppName and endpoint URLs you will need later. Once deployed, verify the API is live: curl -s -H "X-API-Key: <your-api-key>" \ "https://<functionappname>.azurewebsites.net/api/GetNetworkLogs?page=1&pageSize=3" </functionappname></your-api-key> You should see a response like this: The API also exposes an /api/RefreshData endpoint that regenerates the 50 sample records with fresh timestamps. This is useful later in the walkthrough when you want to produce new events and trigger an immediate ingestion cycle without waiting for the next polling interval: curl -s -X POST -H "X-API-Key: <your-api-key>" \ "https://<functionappname>.azurewebsites.net/api/RefreshData" </functionappname></your-api-key> Building the Connector with the Sentinel Connector Builder Agent With the Microsoft Sentinel extension installed and GitHub Copilot running in agent mode, open a Copilot chat and enter a single prompt pointing at the API documentation file: That is the entire invocation. The agent takes it from there. It works through a structured seven-step sequence: preparation, polling config, table schema, DCR, connector definition, package validation, and summary. The agent produces four files in a sentinel-connectors/NetworkLogAPI_CCF/ output folder: NetworkLogAPI_PollingConfig.json – This is the API poller configuration. The agent reads the documentation and correctly identifies the GET /api/GetNetworkLogs endpoint, configures API Key authentication via the X-API-Key header, sets up NextPageUrl pagination using $.metadata.nextLink with a $.metadata.hasNextPage stop condition, and wires up the since query parameter for incremental delta pulls using the timestamp field. The RefreshData endpoint is correctly excluded, which the agent recognizes as a maintenance operation, not a security data stream. NetworkLogAPI_Table.json – This is the custom Log Analytics table schema for NetworkLogAPIGetNetworkLogs_CL . All 20 fields from the API response are mapped to the correct column types, with timestamp promoted to TimeGenerated as the standard Sentinel time column. NetworkLogAPI_DCR.json – This is the Data Collection Rule. This defines the stream declaration, the workspace destination, and the KQL transform that maps the raw snake_case API fields ( sourceIp , destinationIp , threatIndicator , etc.) to their PascalCase table columns. NetworkLogAPI_ConnectorDefinition.json – This is the connector UI configuration. This drives what the connector page looks like in Microsoft Sentinel: the title, description, prerequisite instructions, the BaseUrl and ApiKey input fields, sample KQL queries, and the connectivity status logic. The only point where the agent paused for input was to propose a connector description and ask for confirmation before writing it to the file. Everything else such as endpoint selection, auth type, pagination pattern, schema mapping, KQL transform, cross-file consistency was selected autonomously. To put that in perspective: without the agent, a developer building this connector from scratch would need to manually author four JSON files, understand the CCF schema for polling configs, DCRs, and connector definitions, write the KQL transform by hand, and validate that every cross-file reference lines up correctly. The agent compresses that work, typically hours of reading documentation, trial-and-error, and portal debugging, into a single prompt. Testing the Connector Before deploying anything to a Sentinel workspace, the Microsoft Sentinel connector builder agent lets you validate the generated polling config against the live API directly from your editor. Right-click the sentinel-connectors/NetworkLogAPI_CCF folder, select Microsoft Sentinel → Test Connector (Preview), and a Configuration Variables panel opens asking for the two template variables from the polling config: BaseUrl and apiKey . For other API patterns, there may be additional and different inputs. For example, apiKey input could be swapped with clientID and secret if the API supports OAUTH. Enter the Function App base URL and your API key, and the test runner connects immediately. The panel shows a live polling session. Poll #1 returns HTTP 200 with 50 events, and a countdown timer shows when the next poll will fire. Switching to the Events tab displays the ingested records in a tabular view with columns for timestamp , severity , action , bytesIn , bytesOut , category , and the rest of the mapped fields fresh from the API. Additionally, there are tabs for Headers, Payload, and Response, which can be useful for verifying that your pollerconfig.json configuration provides the expected request to your api with a working response. Data Extracted: The Test Connector feature can be used to visualize the response data in a table format to verify that data will land in a Sentinel table based on your configuration. Request from Poller: The Test Connector feature can be used to validate the request and response headers that will go out to the API based on the generated poller configuration. Request Response: The Test Connector feature shows you the live response from the API with respect to the request going to the API based on the poller configuration. This is a meaningful pre-flight check. It confirms that auth is working, the $.data events path resolves correctly, pagination is functional, and the polling interval fires as configured all before a single file is deployed to Azure. The most common connector configuration issues (wrong base URL, incorrect header name, mismatched JSON path) surface here in seconds rather than after a failed deployment and a 20-minute wait for Sentinel to attempt its first ingestion cycle. It is also the fastest way to troubleshoot if something goes wrong after deployment, far quicker than pushing changes to Azure and waiting for the connector to poll again. Deploying and Enabling the Connector With the connector tested and passing, deployment is the same right-click menu: right-click the sentinel-connectors/NetworkLogAPI_CCF folder, select Microsoft Sentinel → Deploy Connector (Preview). If you are not already signed in to Azure, the extension will prompt you to authenticate. The agent will also provide a clickbox in the chat window to invoke a connector deployment. Right Click Deploy Connector: UI Prompt Based Deploy Method: Once signed in, a workspace picker lists all available Log Analytics workspaces across your subscriptions. Select the one with Sentinel enabled and click Deploy. The extension deploys all four files to the workspace in the correct order: table schema first, then DCR, polling config, and connector definition. Once deployed, navigate to your Sentinel workspace via https://security.microsoft.com, go to Data Connectors, and find the Network Log API connector. The connector page shows the description, prerequisite notes, and the two credential fields generated by the agent: API Base URL and API Key. Enter your Function App base URL and API key and click Connect. The status updates to show the connector is connected and the deployment succeeded. Note: Data will appear in the workspace within 5 to 30 minutes depending on the polling interval. Run this query in Log Analytics to confirm ingestion. Note that the agent derives the table name from the vendor name and endpoint, so yours may differ slightly from the example below. Check the agent's summary output or the NetworkLogAPI_Table.json file for the exact name: NetworkLogAPIGetNetworkLogs_CL | sort by TimeGenerated desc | take 10 If you want to generate a fresh batch of events immediately rather than waiting for the next polling cycle, use the RefreshData endpoint to reset the sample records with new timestamps: curl -s -X POST -H "X-API-Key: " \ "https://.azurewebsites.net/api/RefreshData" Next Steps If you want to go further: Try it with your own API. The lab repo includes documentation on adapting the polling config, schema, and KQL transform to a real data source. Review the CCF connector schema documentation to understand the full range of supported configurations: pagination patterns, auth types, incremental pull strategies, and delta filter expressions. Explore the Microsoft Sentinel content hub to see how published connectors are structured and what the certification requirements look like for production submissions. Conclusion Following these steps, you saw how a working Sentinel connector can be generated, tested, and deployed in minutes rather than requiring days of manual configuration and infrastructure setup. If you are an ISV building a Sentinel integration and want hands-on support, Microsoft’s App Assure program is available to help. We partner with ISVs on connector development, validation, and deployment and provide guidance through implementation, testing, and readiness for production. You can get started by reaching out through our intake form. See our other Sentinel connector feature’s hands-on labs Building a CCF Nested API Pull Connector: A Technical Lab WalkthroughTransform your security operation with a unified experience in Defender
Co-authored with Lizet Pena, Caroline Mutua, Alvin Kua and Marco Sudahl Security operations teams today are being asked to do more than ever: respond faster, manage increasing data volumes, reduce operational complexity, stay ahead of evolving threats, and balance cost and efficiency. That’s why Microsoft is bringing Microsoft Sentinel into Microsoft Defender: to bring together SIEM, XDR, threat intelligence, AI, and automation into a single experience. By March 31, 2027, all Microsoft Sentinel customers will be automatically transitioned to Defender. But this transition is about far more than a new interface. It’s an opportunity to modernize the SOC, streamline operations, and unlock capabilities designed for the AI-first era of security operations. This blog kicks off a six-part series to help you confidently navigate the transition ahead of time, understand what changes (and what doesn’t), and maximize value along the way. Why this post, and why now This is the first of a six-part helping customers transition their Sentinel experience from the Azure portal to Defender: Part 1 – Beyond a portal move (You are here) ○ Part 2 – Anatomy of the change: Incidents, alerts, correlation, and data ○ Part 3 – Detection and automation, reimagined ○ Part 4 – The Governance Shift: RBAC, URBAC, Sentinel data lake, and MSSP ○ Part 5 – Your readiness playbook: Adoption helper, costs, APIs, and checklist ○ Part 6 – The AI-First SOC: Copilot, UEBA, threat intelligence, and SOC optimization The strategic shift in one paragraph Defender represents the convergence of Microsoft’s security capabilities into a single operational experience. Instead of switching between disconnected tools and workflows, security teams can work from one integrated environment spanning SIEM, XDR, threat intelligence, AI-powered investigation and response, cross-domain correlation, and SOC automation. Defender helps analysts investigate incidents faster, enables better collaboration across teams, and reduces operational friction across the security lifecycle. Most importantly, it creates a foundation for the future of AI-assisted and agentic security operations. Why migrate early? While the transition becomes mandatory in 2027, organizations that start earlier can begin realizing value immediately. Moving to Defender today helps organizations: Streamline analyst workflows with a unified incident queue Reduce investigation time through advanced cross-product correlation Take advantage of Security Copilot experiences integrated into Defender Simplify operations across Sentinel and Defender products Modernize governance and access management models Prepare their SOC for AI-driven investigation and response Take advantage of the latest innovations. Rather than treating migration as a compliance deadline, many customers are approaching it as a strategic modernization initiative for their SOC. What changes, and what stays the same One of the most important things to understand is that this is not a “rip and replace” migration. The foundational elements of Microsoft Sentinel remain intact while the operational experience evolves. Area What changes What stays Management plane Defender becomes the primary experience The Sentinel portal in Azure remains usable until March 31, 2027 Incident model Unified incident queue across Sentinel + Defender, XDR correlation, attack story view Log analytics remains the core storage layer Access control Unified RBAC (URBAC) preferred for cross-product, fine-grained access Azure RBAC continues to work until role migration to URBAC; service principals are not supported in URBAC Data Data lake for long-term retention and advanced analytics No workspace migration required Cost Data lake can materially reduce overall cost by shifting high-volume logs out of the analytics tier, also allowing longer term retention at a lower cost (up to 12 years) No change in the business model after moving over to Defender The key takeaway: customers are not rebuilding their environments from scratch. Existing investments continue to work while the operational layer becomes more integrated and intelligent. What Defender unlocks The transition to Defender is designed to unlock capabilities that are difficult to achieve in siloed environments. Security Copilot: Defender enables deeper integration with Security Copilot, including: AI-assisted incident triage Natural-language investigation workflows Guided response recommendations Natural language to KQL experiences Copilot capabilities help reduce analyst fatigue and accelerate investigation workflows. Unified correlation: With a single engine across all your alerts you can create richer, more contextual incidents spanning identities, endpoints, email, cloud apps, and data sources. This means you spend less time stitching alerts together manually and more time focused on high-confidence incidents. Data lake: Sentinel data lake introduces new flexibility for long-term retention, large-scale analytics, and cross-workspace investigation scenarios. For many customers, this creates opportunities to balance visibility, compliance, and cost more effectively. Case management: Collaborate across teams to respond to incidents. Playbook generator: Create custom workflow automations using natural language. Sentinel graph: Visualize relationships across users, devices, and activities to investigate attack paths, blast radius, and root cause. Sentinel MCP server: Let AI agents and Copilot query Sentinel in natural language through a unified, identity-secured Model Context Protocol interface Triage agent: Autonomous Security Copilot agent that triages high-volume alerts (phishing, identity, cloud) with AI reasoning and a transparent rationale. What this means for you Different roles feel this transition differently. Use this as a quick orientation as later posts go deep on each. Role What to pay attention to Security analyst New incident queue, attack story view, and Copilot-assisted triage – your day-to-day surface changes most. Detection engineer Custom detections become the forward direction; analytics rules continue to work but the model is evolving from SIEM to XDR detection. SOC manager URBAC governance, data lake blast-radius, and incident-centric automation reshape how you run the SOC. MSSP and Partner Multi-tenant view (up to 100 tenants), planning to support up to 1k tenants, unified incident queue, dual RBAC model – Lighthouse is still needed for Azure resources. Clearing up common misconceptions “The transition is optional.” No. Customers must migrate their experience by March 31, 2027. “We need to migrate our workspaces.” You do not need to migrate log analytics workspaces simply to use Microsoft Sentinel in Defender. “This is only a UI change.” Defender introduces meaningful operational and architectural improvements across investigation, correlation, governance, automation, and AI-assisted workflows. “The transition itself increases costs.” There is no additional licensing charge simply for using Sentinel in Defender. Optional capabilities—such as Security Copilot or Sentinel data lake usage—may introduce additional costs depending on adoption and usage patterns. How to get started Align your stakeholders: Brief your SOC leadership and detection engineering leads on the March 31, 2027 deadline and the platform shift narrative. Form a readiness team: Identify a small working group (analyst + engineer + SOC manager + identity owner) to own the readiness effort. Explore Defender: Start familiarizing yourself with Defender and workflows. Assess your data strategy: Review how leveraging the data lake may fit into your future strategy. Follow Tech Community: Get more information in this series Additional resources Further reading: The Microsoft Security Community post Migrate Sentinel to Defender – Why it is a security architecture decision, not just a portal change frames the same thesis from an architectural lens. For the official transition guidance, start with the Microsoft Learn article Connect Microsoft Sentinel to the Microsoft Defender portal. Continue the series This is the first of six parts. The remaining posts will be published over the coming days. Each one stands alone, so you can read them in order as they go live or jump to the angle that matters most to you once it's out: Part 2 – Anatomy of the change: Incidents, alerts, correlation, and data If you want component-level mechanics: how the XDR correlation engine replaces Fusion, why incidents are no longer alert-centric, and what changes (and doesn’t) in your data architecture. Part 3 – Detection and automation, reimagined If you write detections or run automation: the shift from analytics rules to custom detections, the move from alert-driven to incident-driven SOAR, and how hunting evolves. Part 4 – The governance shift: RBAC, URBAC, Sentinel data lake, and MSSP If you own identity, access, or multi-tenant operations: the move from Azure RBAC to URBAC, Sentinel data lake, better blast-radius identification, and the MSSP model. Part 5 – Your readiness playbook: Adoption helper, costs, APIs, and the checklist If you need a practical plan: a walk-through of the Defender adoption helper, cost reality, API strategy, and the migration checklist. Part 6 – The AI-first SOC: Copilot, UEBA, Threat intelligence, and SOC optimization If you want to see the destination: how Security Copilot, UEBA, threat intelligence, and SOC optimization combine into a fundamentally different operating model.Microsoft Sentinel data lake FAQ
Microsoft Sentinel data lake (generally available) is a purpose‑built, cloud‑native security data lake. It centralizes all security data in an open format, serving as the foundation for agentic defense, enhanced security insights, and graph-based enrichment. It offers cost‑effective ingestion, long‑term retention, and advanced analytics. In this blog we offer answers to many of the questions we’ve heard from our customers and partners. General questions What is the Microsoft Sentinel data lake? Microsoft has expanded its industry-leading SIEM solution, Microsoft Sentinel, to include a unified, security data lake, designed to help optimize costs, simplify data management, and accelerate the adoption of AI in security operations. This modern data lake serves as the foundation for the Microsoft Sentinel platform. It has a cloud-native architecture and is purpose-built for security—bringing together all security data for greater visibility, deeper security analysis, contextual awareness and agentic defense. It provides affordable, long-term retention, allowing organizations to maintain robust security while effectively managing budgetary requirements. What are the benefits of Sentinel data lake? Microsoft Sentinel data lake is purpose built for security offering flexible analytics, cost management, and deeper security insights. Sentinel data lake: Centralizes security data delta parquet and open format for easy access. This unified data foundation accelerates threat detection, investigation, and response across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Enables data federation by allowing customers to access data in external sources like Microsoft Fabric, ADLS and Databricks from the data lake. Federated data appears alongside native Sentinel data, enabling correlated hunting, investigation, and custom graph analysis across a broader digital estate. Offers a disaggregated storage and compute pricing model, allowing customers to store massive volumes of security data at a fraction of the cost compared to traditional SIEM solutions. Allows multiple analytics engines like Kusto, Spark, and ML to run on a single data copy, simplifying management, reducing costs, and supporting deeper security analysis. Integrates with GitHub Copilot and VS Code empowering SOC teams to automate enrichment, anomaly detection, and forensic analysis. Supports AI agents via the MCP server, allowing tools like GitHub Copilot to query and automate security tasks. The MCP Server layer brings intelligence to the data, offering Semantic Search, Query Tools, and Custom Analysis capabilities that make it easier to extract insights and automate workflows. Provides streamlined onboarding, intuitive table management, and scalable multi-tenant support, making it ideal for MSSPs and large enterprises. The Sentinel data lake is designed for security workloads, ensuring that processes from ingestion to analytics meet evolving cybersecurity requirements. Is Microsoft Sentinel SIEM going away? No. Microsoft is expanding Sentinel into an AI powered end-to-end security platform that includes SIEM and new platform capabilities - Security data lake, graph-powered analytics and MCP Server. SIEM remains a core component and will be actively developed and supported. Getting started What are the prerequisites for Sentinel data lake? To get started: Connect your Sentinel workspace to Microsoft Defender prior to onboarding to Sentinel data lake. Once in the Defender experience see data lake onboarding documentation for next steps. Note: Sentinel is moving to the Microsoft Defender portal and the Sentinel Azure portal will be retired by March 31, 2027. I am a Sentinel-only customer, and not a Defender customer. Can I use the Sentinel data lake? Yes. You must connect Sentinel to the Defender experience before onboarding to the Sentinel data lake. Microsoft Sentinel is generally available in the Microsoft Defender portal, with or without Microsoft Defender XDR or an E5 license. If you have created a log analytics workspace, enabled it for Sentinel and have the right Microsoft Entra roles (e.g. Global Administrator + Subscription Owner, Security Administrator + Sentinel Contributor), you can enable Sentinel in the Defender portal. For more details on how to connect Sentinel to Defender review these sources: Microsoft Sentinel in the Microsoft Defender portal In what regions is Sentinel data lake available? For supported regions see: Geographical availability and data residency in Microsoft Sentinel | Azure Docs. Is there an expected release date for Microsoft Sentinel data lake in GCC, GCC-H, and DoD? While the exact date is not yet finalized, we plan to expand Sentinel data lake to the US Government environments. . How will URBAC and Entra RBAC work together to manage the data lake given there is no centralized model? Entra RBAC will provide broad access to the data lake (URBAC maps the right permissions to specific Entra role holders: GA/SA/SO/GR/SR). URBAC will become a centralized pane for configuring non-global delegated access to the data lake. For today, you will use this for the “default data lake” workspace. In the future, this will be enabled for non-default Sentinel workspaces as well – meaning all workspaces in the data lake can be managed here for data lake RBAC requirements. Azure RBAC on the Log Analytics (LA) workspace in the data lake is respected through URBAC as well today. If you already hold a built-in role like log analytics reader, you will be able to run interactive queries over the tables in that workspace. Or, if you hold log analytics contributor, you can read and manage table data. For more details see: Roles and permissions in the Microsoft Sentinel platform | Microsoft Learn Data ingestion and storage How do I ingest data into the Sentinel data lake? To ingest data into the Sentinel data lake, you can use existing Sentinel data connectors or custom connectors to bring data from Microsoft and third-party sources. Data can be ingested into the analytics tier or the data lake tier. Data ingested into the analytics tier is automatically mirrored to the lake (at no additional cost). Alternatively, data that is not needed in the analytics tier can be ingested directly into the data lake. Data retention is configured directly in table management, for both analytics retention and data lake storage. Note: Certain tables do not support data lake-only ingestion via either API or data connector UI. See here for more information: Custom log tables. What is Microsoft’s guidance on when to use analytics tier vs. the data lake tier? Sentinel data lake offers flexible, built-in data tiering (analytics and data lake tiers) to effectively meet diverse business use cases and achieve cost optimization goals. Analytics tier: Is ideal for high-performance, real-time, end-to-end detections, enrichments, investigation and interactive dashboards. Typically, high-fidelity data from EDRs, email gateways, identity, SaaS and cloud logs, threat intelligence (TI) should be ingested into the analytics tier. Data in the analytics tier is best monitored proactively with scheduled alerts and scheduled analytics to enable security detections Data in this tier is retained at no cost for up to 90 days by default, extendable to 2 years. A copy of the data in this tier is automatically available in the data lake tier at no extra cost, ensuring a unified copy of security data for both tiers. Data lake tier: Is designed for cost-effective, long-term storage. High-volume logs like NetFlow logs, TLS/SSL certificate logs, firewall logs and proxy logs are best suited for data lake tier. Customers can use these logs for historical analysis, compliance and auditing, incident response (IR), forensics over historical data, build tenant baselines, TI matching and then promote resulting insights into the analytics tier. Customers can run full Kusto queries, Spark Notebooks and scheduled jobs over a single copy of their data in the data lake. Customers can also search, enrich and promote data from the data lake tier to the analytics tier for full analytics. For more details see documentation. What does it mean that a copy of all new analytics tier data will be available in the data lake? When Sentinel data lake is enabled, a copy of all new data ingested into the analytics tier is automatically duplicated into the data lake tier. This means customers don’t need to manually configure or manage this process, every new log or telemetry added to the analytics tier becomes instantly available in the data lake. This allows security teams to run advanced analytics, historical investigations, and machine learning models on a single, unified copy of data in the lake, while still using the analytics tier for real-time SOC workflows. It’s a seamless way to support both operational and long-term use cases—without duplicating effort or cost. What is the guidance for customers using data federation capability in Sentinel data lake? Starting April 1, 2026, federate data from Microsoft Fabric, ADLS, and Azure Databricks into Sentinel data lake. Use data federation when data is exploratory, infrequently accessed, or must remain at source due to governance, compliance, sovereignty, or contractual requirements. Ingest data directly into Sentinel to unlock full SIEM capabilities, always-on detections, advanced automation, and AI‑driven defense at scale. This approach lets security teams start where their data already lives — preserving governance, then progressively ingest data into Sentinel for full security value. Is there any cost for retention in the analytics tier? Analytics ingestion includes 90 days of interactive retention, at no additional cost. Simply set analytics retention to 90 days or less. Analytics retention beyond 90 days will incur a retention cost. Data can be retained longer within the data lake by using the “total retention” setting. This allows you to extend retention within the data lake for up to 12 years. While data is retained within the analytics tier, there is no charge for the mirrored data within the lake. Retaining data in the lake beyond the analytics retention period incurs additional storage costs. See documentation for more details: Manage data tiers and retention in Microsoft Sentinel | Microsoft Learn What is the guidance for Microsoft Sentinel Basic and Auxiliary Logs customers? If you previously enabled Basic or Auxiliary Logs plan in Sentinel: You can view Basic Logs in the Defender portal but manage it from the Log Analytics workspace. To manage it in the Defender portal, you must change the plan from Basic to Analytics. Once the table is transitioned to the analytics tier, if desired, it can then be transitioned to the data lake. Existing Auxiliary Log tables will be available in the data lake tier for use once the Sentinel data lake is enabled. Billing for these tables will automatically switch to the Sentinel data lake meters. Microsoft Sentinel customers are recommended to start planning their data management strategy with the data lake. While Basic and Auxiliary Logs are still available, they are not being enhanced further. Sentinel data lake offers more capabilities at a lower price point. Please plan on onboarding your security data to the Sentinel data lake. Azure Monitor customers can continue to use Basic and Auxiliary Logs for observability scenarios. What happens to customers that already have Archive logs enabled? If a customer has already configured tables for Archive retention, existing retention settings will not change and will be automatically inherited by the Sentinel data lake. All data, including existing data in archive retention will be billed using the data lake storage meter, benefiting from 6x data compression. However, the data itself will not move. Existing data in archive will continue to be accessible through Sentinel search and restore experiences: o Data will not be backfilled into the data lake. o Data will be billed using the data lake storage meter. New data ingested after enabling the data lake: o Will be automatically mirrored to the data lake and accessible through data lake explorer. o Data will be billed using the data lake storage meter. Example: If a customer has 12 months of total retention enabled on a table, 2 months after enabling ingestion into the Sentinel data lake, the customer will still have access to 10 months of archived data (through Sentinel search and restore experiences), but access to only 2 months of data in the data lake (since the data lake was enabled). Key considerations for customers that currently have Archive logs enabled: The existing archive will remain, with new data ingested into the data lake going forward; previously stored archive data will not be backfilled into the lake. Archive logs will continue to be accessible via the Search and Restore tab under Sentinel. If analytics and data lake mode are enabled on table, which is the default setting for analytics tables when Sentinel data lake is enabled, all new data will be ingested into the Sentinel data lake. There will only be one storage meter (which is data lake storage) going forward. Archive will continue to be accessible via Search and Restore. If Sentinel data lake-only mode is enabled on table, new data will be ingested only into the data lake; any data that’s not already in the Sentinel data lake won’t be migrated/backfilled. Only data that was previously ingested under the archive plan will be accessible via Search and Restore. What is the guidance for customers using Azure Data Explorer (ADX) alongside Microsoft Sentinel? Some customers might have set up ADX cluster for their DIY lake setup. Customers can choose to continue using that setup and gradually migrate to Sentinel data lake for new data that they want to manage. The lake explorer will support federation with ADX to enable the customers to migrate gradually and simplify their deployment. What happens to the Defender XDR data after enabling Sentinel data lake? By default, Defender XDR tables are available for querying in advanced hunting, with 30 days of analytics tier retention included with the XDR license. To retain data beyond this period, an explicit change to the retention setting is required, either by extending the analytics tier retention or the total retention period. You can extend the retention period of supported Defender XDR tables beyond 30 days and ingest the data into the analytics tier. For more information see Manage XDR data in Microsoft Sentinel. You can also ingest XDR data directly into the data lake tier. See here for more information. A list of XDR advanced hunting tables supported by Sentinel are documented here: Connect Microsoft Defender XDR data to Microsoft Sentinel | Microsoft Learn. KQL queries and jobs Is KQL and Notebook supported over the Sentinel data lake? Yes, via the data lake KQL query experience along with a fully managed Notebook experience which enables spark-based big data analytics over a single copy of all your security data. Customers can run queries across any time range of data in their Sentinel data lake. In the future, this will be extended to enable SQL query over lake as well. Note: Triggering a KQL job directly via an API or Logic App is not yet supported but is on the roadmap. Why are there two different places to run KQL queries in Sentinel experience? Advanced hunting queries both XDR and analytics tables, with compute cost included. Data lake explorer only queries data in the lake and incurs a separate compute cost. Consolidating advanced hunting and KQL explorer user interfaces is on the roadmap. This will provide security analysts a unified query experience across both analytics and data lake tiers. Where is the output from KQL jobs stored? KQL jobs are written into existing or new custom tables in the analytics tier. Is it possible to run KQL queries on multiple data lake tables? Yes, you can run KQL interactive queries and jobs using operators like join or union. Can KQL queries (either interactive or via KQL jobs) join data across multiple workspaces? Security teams can run multi-workspace KQL queries for broader threat correlation Pricing and billing How does a customer pay for Sentinel data lake? Billing is automatically enabled at the time of onboarding based on Azure Subscription and Resource Group selections. Customers are then charged based on the volume of data ingested, retained, and analyzed (e.g. KQL Queries and Jobs). See Sentinel pricing page for more details. 2. What are the pricing components for Sentinel data lake? Sentinel data lake offers a flexible pricing model designed to optimize security coverage and costs. At a high level, pricing is based on the volume of data ingested/processed, the volume of data retained, and the volume of data processed. For specific meter definitions, see documentation. 3. How does the business model for Sentinel SIEM change with the introduction of the data lake? There is no change to existing Sentinel analytics tier ingestion business model. Sentinel data lake has separate meters for ingestion, storage and analytics. 4. What happens to the existing Sentinel SIEM and related Azure Monitor billing meters when a customer onboards to Sentinel data lake? When a customer onboards to the Sentinel data lake, nothing changes with analytic ingestion or retention. Customers using data archive and Auxiliary Logs will automatically transition to the new data lake meters. How does data lake storage affect cost efficiency for high volume data retention? Sentinel data lake offers cost-effective, long-term storage with uniform data compression of 6:1 across all data sources, applicable only to data lake storage. Example: For 600GB of data stored, you are only billed for 100GB compressed data. This approach allows organizations to retain greater volumes of security data over extended periods cost-effectively, thereby reducing security risks without compromising their overall security posture. here How “Data Processing” billed? To support the ingestion and standardization of diverse data sources, the Data Processing feature applies a $0.10 per GB (US East) charge for all data ingested into the data lake. This feature enables a broad array of transformations like redaction, splitting, filtering and normalization. The data processing charge is applied per GB of uncompressed data Note: For regional pricing, please refer to the “Data processing” meter within the Microsoft Sentinel Pricing official documentation. Does “Data processing” meter apply to analytics tier data mirrored in the data lake? No. Data processing charge will not be applied to mirrored data. Data mirrored from the analytic tier is not subject to either data ingestion or processing charges. How is retention billed for tables that use data lake-only ingestion & retention? Sentinel data lake decouples ingestion, storage, and analytics meters. Customers have the flexibility to pay based on how data is retained and used. For tables that use data lake‑only ingestion, there is no included free retention—unlike the analytics tier, which includes 90 days of analytics retention. Retention charges begin immediately once data is stored in the data lake. Data lake storage billing is based on compressed data size rather than raw ingested volume, which significantly reduces storage costs and delivers lower overall retention spend for customers. Does data federation incur charges? Data federation does not generate any ingestion or storage fees in Sentinel data lake. Customers are billed only when they run analytics or queries on federated data, with charges based on Sentinel data lake compute and analytics meters. This means customers pay solely for actual data usage, not mere connectivity. How do I understand Sentinel data lake costs? Sentinel data lake costs driven by three primary factors: how much data is ingested, how long that data is retained, and how the data is used. Customers can flexibly choose to ingest data into the analytics tier or data lake tier, and these architectural choices directly impact cost. For example, data can be ingested into the analytics tier—where commitment tiers help optimize costs for high data volumes—or ingested data directly into the Sentinel data lake for lower‑cost ingestion, storage, and on‑demand analysis. Customers are encouraged to work with their Microsoft account team to obtain an accurate cost estimate tailored to their environment. See Sentinel pricing page to understand Sentinel pricing. How do I manage Sentinel data lake costs? Built-in cost management experiences help customers with cost predictability, billing transparency, and operational efficiency. Reports provide customers with insights into usage trends over time, enabling them to identify cost drivers and optimize data retention and processing strategies. Set usage-based alerts on specific meters to monitor and control costs. For example, receive alerts when query or notebook usage passes set limits, helping avoid unexpected expenses and manage budgets. See our Sentinel cost management documentation to learn more. If I’m an Auxiliary Logs customer, how will onboarding to the Sentinel data lake affect my billing? Once a workspace is onboarded to Sentinel data lake, all Auxiliary Logs meters will be replaced by new data lake meters. Do we charge for data lake ingestion and storage for graph experiences? Microsoft Sentinel graph-based experiences are included as part of the existing Defender and Purview licenses. However, Sentinel graph requires Sentinel data lake and specific data sources to build the underlying graph. Enabling these data sources will incur ingestion and data lake storage costs. Note: For Sentinel SIEM customers, most required data sources are free for analytics ingestion. Non-entitled sources such as Microsoft Entra ID logs will incur ingestion and data lake storage costs. How is Entra asset data and ARG data billed? Data lake ingestion charges of $0.05 per GB (US EAST) will apply to Entra asset data and ARG data. Note: This was previously not billed during public preview and is billed since data lake GA. To learn more, see: https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/sentinel/datalake/enable-data-connectors When a customer activates Sentinel data lake, what happens to tables with archive logs enabled? To simplify billing, once the data lake is enabled, all archive data will be billed using the data lake storage meter. This provides consistent long-term retention billing and includes automatic 6x data compression. For most customers, this change results in lower long‑term retention costs. However, customers who previously had discounted archive retention pricing will not automatically receive the same discounts on the new data lake storage meters. In these cases, customers should engage their Microsoft account team to review pricing implications before enabling the Sentinel data lake. Thank you Thank you to our customers and partners for your continued trust and collaboration. Your feedback drives our innovation, and we’re excited to keep evolving Microsoft Sentinel to meet your security needs. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out—we’re here to support you every step of the way. Learn more: Get started with Sentinel data lake today: https://aka.ms/Get_started/Sentinel_datalake Microsoft Sentinel AI-ready platform: https://aka.ms/Microsoft_Sentinel Sentinel data lake videos: https://aka.ms/Sentineldatalake_videos Latest innovations and updates on Sentinel: https://aka.ms/msftsentinelblog Sentinel pricing page: https://aka.ms/MicrosoftSentinel_PricingWhat’s new in Microsoft Sentinel: May 2026
Welcome to the May edition of What's new in Microsoft Sentinel. This month’s updates focus on unified role-based access control (RBAC), ecosystem breadth, AI-agent security, and high-assurance identity. RBAC and row-level scoping are now generally available, giving security teams a single, granular permissions model across Sentinel and the Microsoft Defender portal and enabling multi-team SOC collaboration. The Sentinel connector catalog has passed 400 connectors, expanding coverage across Microsoft and third-party data sources and helping customers and partners onboard new data faster with the Codeless Connector Framework (CCF). The Agent 365 connector, now in public preview, brings AI agent telemetry into Sentinel data lake as first-class standardized signals so you can monitor agent behavior alongside identity, endpoint, and cloud activity. Finally, Entra Verified ID partner integrations in Microsoft Security Store are now generally available, delivering high‑assurance identity verification that makes account recovery after compromise far safer and significantly reduces the risk of re‑compromise. Read on for the full list of updates across Sentinel in May. Sentinel innovations: Sentinel SIEM Sentinel data lake Microsoft Security Store Sentinel SIEM Unified role-based access controls and row level scoping [Generally available] Sentinel now delivers general availability of two powerful access management capabilities: Unified RBAC and row-level data scoping. Together, these innovations provide a consistent, end-to-end model for controlling who can access data and what actions they can take — extending unified permissions management across the Defender portal while enabling granular, row-level visibility within a single Sentinel workspace. With Unified RBAC, organizations can simplify and centralize permissions across security workloads, reducing operational overhead, while row-level scoping enables secure collaboration across multiple teams by ensuring users only see data aligned to their role or scope. This milestone unlocks more scalable, multi-team SOC operations without the need for workspace segmentation, helping us to advance toward fully unified, granular access control across Microsoft Security. Tenant groups [Public preview] Managing security across multiple tenants just got simpler. Tenant Groups in the Microsoft Defender multi-tenant portal (MTO) give managed security service providers (MSSPs), cloud service partners (CSPs), and multi-tenant security teams a flexible way to organize tenants into logical groupings such as customer segment, geography, or operational priority, and instantly switch views with a single click. This streamlined experience reduces noise, improves investigation focus, and aligns to how teams actually work, all while respecting existing permissions and access controls. Learn more. Out-of-the-box integrations for Sentinel automation [Public preview] Out-of-the-box (OOTB) integrations for Sentinel automation brings a centralized catalog to easily discover, configure, and manage both Microsoft and third-party integrations. With simple, authentication-based setup, users can quickly add integrations and seamlessly incorporate them into playbooks. The experience places OOTB and custom integrations side by side, with enhanced with smart search, recommendations, and duplicate prevention to streamline automation workflows end to end. Learn more. UEBA enhancements [Public preview] Microsoft Sentinel UEBA continues to evolve with improvements that simplify management and expand detection coverage. A dedicated UEBA tab view in the Sentinel settings page consolidates UEBA and behaviors settings, making configuration easier to find and manage. Learn more. UEBA insights and anomalies now support the OktaV2_CL table alongside the existing Okta_CL table, extending anomalous activity and anomalous MFA failures detections to customers using the newer Okta connector format, without requiring new anomaly types. Learn more. UEBA extends GCP Audit Logs coverage with five anomaly detections for login activity, privileged actions, resource deployments, secret/KMS key access, and infrastructure usage. Learn more. Together, these updates make UEBA easier to operate while extending its visibility into identity and behavior signals from additional cloud and identity providers. Read the latest blog from the Microsoft Defender Research Team to learn more about Microsoft Sentinel UEBA and binary feature stacking, which uses clear binary signals to help establish behavioral context and inform investigation and detection decisions. Threat Intelligence – TAXII Export connector [Generally available] Sentinel supports threat intelligence export through the built-in Threat Intelligence – Trusted Automated Exchange of Intelligence Information (TAXII) Export connector, giving customers a standards-based way to share curated Structured Threat Information Expression (STIX) objects with supported TAXII 2.1 platforms. Configured from the Defender portal, the connector handles destination setup and intelligence delivery to external platforms. The capability supports cross-organization intelligence sharing for collective defense and centralized management in multi-tenant environments, with use cases across government, critical infrastructure, and large distributed organizations. Additional enhancements are planned, including more export options and expanded destination support. Learn more. Decision-stage resources for SIEM migration to Sentinel The AI-powered SIEM migration experience helps teams analyze detections, identify required data sources and connectors, and plan a phased move to Sentinel. But, customers still need help turning that analysis into a clear decision. To support that step, we’re introducing two new customer-facing resources: the Sentinel SIEM Migration Decision and Planning Guide, which explains the migration journey, outputs, and decision checkpoints before execution, and the Decision-Stage Customer FAQ, which answers common questions around disruption, cost, dual running, detection coverage, and delivery support. Together, these resources help make migration conversations more concrete and move teams more quickly from evaluation to a clearer, lower-risk next step. Learn more: Read the blog: AI-powered SIEM migration experience announcement Download the guide: Decision and planning guide Download the FAQ: Decision-stage customer FAQ Learn more: SIEM migration experience documentation Register for live AMA (Jun 23 at 9am PT): Live Microsoft Tech Community AMA on SIEM migration Sentinel data lake 400+ Sentinel data connectors The Sentinel connector catalog now includes 400+ connectors, providing broad, ready-to-deploy coverage across Microsoft and third-party data sources. Customers can flexibly ingest security data into Microsoft Sentinel analytics tier or the data lake tier. The Codeless Connector Framework (CCF) and VS code-based connector builder agent enables partners and customers to onboard new data sources faster and scale the catalog. Discover connectors in the Sentinel Content hub within the Defender portal or build custom connectors when needed. Learn more. Agent 365 connector [Public preview] Agent 365 connector streams AI agent telemetry from Agent 365 into Sentinel data lake, giving SOC teams visibility into agent behavior alongside identity, endpoint, and cloud signals. With the Agent 365 connector in place, Sentinel data lake becomes the system of record for agent security, turning activity such as data exposure or access drift into first-class security signals that analysts can correlate, hunt across, and investigate. Telemetry is normalized and to mapped to standard Advanced Security Information Model (ASIM) schemas, ready for analytics and detections, and end-to-end investigations can run through KQL, graph, and MCP-powered workflows. Install the connector with a single click from Sentinel Content Hub in the Defender portal. Learn more. CCF support for Azure Blob Storage [Public preview] Sentinel Codeless Connector Framework (CCF) supports Azure Blob Storage as a data source, providing an ingestion pattern designed for high-volume security data. Partners and customers can build CCF connectors that read from Blob Storage through a durable architecture that buffers spikes, handles backpressure, and reduces data loss risk during outages or throttling, making ingestion more reliable for variable or distributed pipelines. The pattern broadens compatibility with partners already streaming logs to Azure as part of their audit data delivery, with Cloudflare and Netskope as early adopters. App Assure further provides engineering-backed support for designing, validating, and remediating the Azure Blob Storage CCF connector integration. Learn more. Data filtering and splitting [Generally available] At RSAC, we announced built‑in filtering and splitting capabilities in Microsoft Sentinel, which is now generally available. As security teams ingest more data, it is important to optimize security data pipeline by controlling what data is ingested and in which tier. With filtering and splitting natively integrated into the Defender portal, security teams can shape data before it reaches Sentinel, without switching tools or managing custom JSON files. Using simple KQL‑based transformations directly in the UI, you can filter low‑value events and intelligently route data, making ingestion optimization faster, more intuitive, and easier to manage at scale. Filtering at ingest time allows you to remove low‑value or benign events to reduce noise, lower unnecessary processing, and ensure high‑signal data drives detections and investigations. Splitting enables intelligent routing of data between the analytics tier and the data lake tier based on relevance and usage. Together, these capabilities help you balance cost and performance while scaling data ingestion sustainably as your digital estate grows. Learn more. Transition your Sentinel connectors to the Codeless Connector Framework (CCF) [Action required] Azure has announced that the legacy Azure Data Collection API will be deprecated on September 14, 2026. Sentinel recommends customers review existing connectors and upgrade to the latest Codeless Connector Framework (CCF) versions to ensure continued access to the newest Sentinel capabilities. CCF delivers a fully managed SaaS experience with built-in health monitoring, centralized credential management, and improved performance. This enables partners and customers to onboard new data sources faster and at scale. Microsoft Security Store Entra Verified ID partner integrations via Security Store [Generally available] Security Store helps organizations secure one of the most critical steps in incident response: safe account recovery after compromise. Once a SOC team detects and contains a potential account takeover (ATO), restoring access requires high confidence that the user is legitimate. Through partner integrations with IDEMIA, AU10TIX, CLEAR, 1Kosmos, and WhoAmI, customers can extend Entra Verified ID with high-assurance identity verification (such as document and biometric checks) to validate users during recovery, onboarding, or helpdesk workflows. This helps replace weaker fallback methods that attackers often exploit, enabling SOC and IT teams to safely restore access while reducing risk of re-compromise. Learn more. Purview Data Security Triage Agent in Defender [Public preview] Security Store powers how customers discover and activate data security agents across Defender and Microsoft Purview, starting with the Data Security Triage Agent. This capability delivers AI-generated summaries and prioritization of Data Loss Prevention (DLP) alerts directly into Defender XDR, helping security teams reduce noise and focus on the incidents that matter most. By unifying discovery and activation through Security Store, customers can deploy data security agents in fewer steps and enable more integrated workflows across threat and data protection surfaces. Learn more. Additional resources Blogs and documentation: From idea to production: Building Security Store Advisor with an agentic SDLC Upcoming webinars: June 4: End-to-End Security in the Age of Agentic AI June 10: Deploy, optimize, and implement threat protection with Sentinel June 10: Security Foundations for AI Adoption June 24: Modern Security Made Simple: Stay Ahead of Threats with Sentinel Upcoming events: June 2–3: Microsoft Build, San Francisco (and free online) CEO Satya Nadella Day 1 keynote 90+ sessions, Microsoft Security experts onsite Register: build.microsoft.com Stay connected Check back each month for the latest innovations, updates, and events to ensure you’re getting the most out of Microsoft Sentinel. We’ll see you in the next edition!The Microsoft Copilot Data Connector for Microsoft Sentinel is Now in Public Preview
*Please note that this connector is now in GA status as of March, 2026* We are happy to announce a new data connector that is available to the public: the Microsoft Copilot data connector for Microsoft Sentinel. The new Microsoft Copilot data connector will allow for audit logs and activities generated by different offerings of Copilot to be ingested into Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Sentinel data lake. This allows for Copilot activities to be leveraged within Microsoft Sentinel features such as analytic rules/custom detections, Workbooks, automation, and more. This also allows for Copilot data to be sent to Sentinel data lake, which opens the possibilities for integrations with custom graphs, MCP server, and more while offering lower cost ingestion and longer retention as needed. Eligibility for the Connector The connector is available for all customers within Microsoft Sentinel, but will only ingest data for environments that have access to Copilot licenses and SCUs as the activities rely on Copilot being used. These logs are available via the Purview Unified Audit Log (UAL) feed, which is available and enabled for all users by default. A big value of this new connector is that it eliminates the need for users to go to the Purview Portal in order to see these activities, as they are proactively brought into the workspace, enabling SOCs to generate detections and proactively threat hunt on this information. Note: This data connector is a single-tenant connector, meaning that it will ingest the data for the entire tenant that it resides in. This connector is not designed to handle multi-tenant configurations. What’s Included in the Connector The following are record types from Office 365 Management API that will be supported as part of this connector: 261 CopilotInteraction 310 CreateCopilotPlugin 311 UpdateCopilotPlugin 312 DeleteCopilotPlugin 313 EnableCopilotPlugin 314 DisableCopilotPlugin 315 CreateCopilotWorkspace 316 UpdateCopilotWorkspace 317 DeleteCopilotWorkspace 318 EnableCopilotWorkspace 319 DisableCopilotWorkspace 320 CreateCopilotPromptBook 321 UpdateCopilotPromptBook 322 DeleteCopilotPromptBook 323 EnableCopilotPromptBook 324 DisableCopilotPromptBook 325 UpdateCopilotSettings 334 TeamCopilotInteraction 363 Microsoft365CopilotScheduledPrompt 371 OutlookCopilotAutomation 389 CopilotForSecurityTrigger 390 CopilotAgentManagement These are great options for monitoring users who have permission to make changes to Copilot across the environment. This data can assist with identifying if there are anomalous interactions taking place between users and Copilot, unauthorized attempts of access, or malicious prompt usage. How to Deploy the Connector The connector is available via the Microsoft Sentinel Content Hub and can be installed today. To find the connector: Within the Defender Portal, expand the Microsoft Sentinel navigation in the left menu. Expand Configuration and select Content Hub. Within the search bar, search for “Copilot”. Click on the solution that appears and click Install. Once the solution is installed, the connector can be configured by clicking on the connector within the solution and selecting Open Connector Page. To enable the connector, the user will need either Global Administrator or Security Administrator on the tenant. Once the connector is enabled, the data will be sent to the table named CopilotActivity. Note: Data ingestion costs apply when using this data connector. Pricing will be based on the settings for the Microsoft Sentinel workspace or at the Microsoft Sentinel data lake tier pricing. As this data connector is in Public Preview, users can start deploying this connector right now! As always, let us know what you think in the comments so that we may continue to build what is most valuable to you. We hope that this new data connector continues to assist your SOC with high valuable insights that best empowers your security. Resources: Office Management API Event Number List: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/office-365-management-api/office-365-management-activity-api-schema#auditlogrecordtype Purview Unified Audit Log Library: Audit log activities | Microsoft Learn Copilot Inclusion in the Microsoft E5 Subscription: Learn about Security Copilot inclusion in Microsoft 365 E5 subscription | Microsoft Learn Microsoft Sentinel: What is Microsoft Sentinel SIEM? | Microsoft Learn Microsoft Sentinel Platform: Microsoft Sentinel data lake overview - Microsoft Security | Microsoft Learn
