Disable Unused Content

When building new SIEM environments or working with existing ones, one of the quickest ways you can improve the performance and stability of the environment is to remove unused content. While this may seem obvious to experienced SIEM resources, it’s common to find reports or rules running in the background that don’t serve a purpose. In some environments, unused content can be slowing the system down and contributing to application instability. Unused content is especially common in environments that don’t have enough staff to manage the SIEM.

Default rules provided by the vendor are often enabled but unused. The first indication that a rule is unused is if it doesn’t have an action or it isn’t used for informational purposes. If a rule isn’t alerted to the attention of an investigator or SIEM engineer, it may be that the rule is simply running in the background consuming system sources. A rule to trigger an alert when someone logs into the SIEM may be useful, but an ad-hoc report to obtain the same information may suffice. A significant amount of inefficient rules that match a large percentage of events can adversely affect the performance of the environment.

Reports can be another source of unused content. In many environments, I find reports that were originally setup to be used temporarily, but are no longer being used by the recipient. It’s often for the recipient to forget to follow up with the SIEM staff to note the reports are no longer required. Over a period of several years, this can easily amount to several dozen reports running on a regular basis, putting a significant strain on the system for no benefit.

All SIEM environments are different, and there’s no set of content that must be enabled or disabled. But there’s very likely content in your environment that can be disabled, and the system resources can instead be used to provide security analysts better search response times. So on a regular basis or whenever there’s a complaint about search response times or application instability, determine if there’s any content that can be safely disabled.