If you are a security operations center (SOC) manager, reducing risk is your No. 1 priority. Even if you are not tracking any metrics today, you know how important metrics are for proving out the value, efficiency, and needs of your security program.

For example, alarm and incident metrics are critical for understanding your security program’s maturity posture — from the moment an alarm appears to the time it takes for the security team to fully resolve the threat.

When you use metrics to identify strategic initiatives that will systematically improve and reduce response times across alarms and incidents, the result will increase overall alarm triage and incident handling rates for the team. As these rates improve, you will reduce your risk and threats like data loss, infected computers, the spread of ransomware, misconfigurations, privileged account abuse, and compliance violations decrease.

The Value of Tracking SOC Metrics

Beyond the goal of helping you reduce your organizational risk, tracking SOC metrics can offer other tangible benefits to reinforce your need for a cybersecurity program. Metrics can also help you:

• Develop Your Program: Baseline your current incident rates and handling times to identify initiatives that will increase efficiency, reduce risk, and improve the success of your SOC team.

Tip: Define future goals and demonstrate the value of your proposed initiatives with metrics to support them in a way that can be delivered to senior leadership.

• Gain Executive Support: Present the evidence and your goals to senior leadership to gain executive approval and additional budget for your security program initiatives.

Tip: Make sure you choose strategic metrics that interest senior leadership and support the mission of your organization.

• Measure Impacts: Assess your program’s security maturity over time to define future goals and produce high-impact results.

Tip: Develop standardized processes to more effectively monitor and improve the controls you have in place.

Easily Track Your SOC KPIs in Your SIEM with LogRhythm

If like most teams you are not tracking KPIs for your SOC, LogRhythm can help. LogRhythm can play a central role in your day-to-day security operations strategy and help support the assessment of your company’s security posture. Our solutions provide the means to track, investigate, and mitigate threats, as well as to measure and monitor the maturity of your security processes.

Through reports and dashboard widgets that display case/incident and alarm activity/metrics, LogRhythm provides important insight into the efficiency of your security process and highlights the effectiveness of using Case Management to track security issues and resolutions. The LogRhythm NextGen SIEM enables you to automatically start tracking two different types of alarm metrics and four different types of case management metrics detailed below.

Alarm metrics provide insights to help you track the efficiency of the alarm triage process, discover how quickly your SOC resolves alarms down to the priority level, and compare triage efficiency across different entities and alarm groups. These include:

• Alarm Time to Qualify (TTQ): Measures the time between an alarm firing and being acted upon (status change, drilldown, added to case)
• Alarm Time to Triage (TTT): Measures the time between an alarm firing and being closed

Case metrics provide insights to help you track trends across incidents and non-incidents, monitor shifts in incident detection and response handling rates, discover average response times by incident type, and measure response times by analyst. These include:

• Incident Time to Detect (TTD): Measures the time it took from the moment the threat appeared in the environment to when it was recognized as a threat
• Time to Mitigate (TTM): Measures the time it took from the moment the threat was recognized to the moment it was mitigated in the environment
• Time to Recover (TTV): Measures the time it took from the moment the incident was recognized to when it was resolved
• Incident Time to Response (TTR): Measures the total duration of the case from the time it was opened to when it was closed

Want to learn more about the security metrics you should be tracking for your program? Check out the 7 Metrics to Measure the Effectiveness of Your Security Operations e-Book to learn more.