Module 2 · SIEM Fundamentals

Manish Garg
Manish Garg Associate of (ISC)² · RingSafe
Apr 22, 2026
7 min read
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Last updated: April 29, 2026

SIEM architecture, log pipeline, parsing and normalization, retention tiering, and vendor landscape for 2026.

A SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) platform is the log backbone of a SOC. It takes logs from every source in the environment, normalizes them into a common shape, and makes them searchable and correlatable. Without a SIEM, analysts are tailing twelve different consoles. With a well-operated SIEM, they are running one query and seeing the whole picture. This module covers what goes into a SIEM, how logs get parsed and normalized, and the pragmatic choices Indian teams make when selecting and running one.

What a SIEM actually does

Strip the marketing and a SIEM has four jobs:

  1. Ingest — accept logs from heterogeneous sources (endpoint, network, cloud, application, identity)
  2. Parse & normalize — turn raw log lines into structured events with consistent field names
  3. Store & search — keep the events queryable for days to years depending on retention policy
  4. Detect — run correlation rules continuously to fire alerts when conditions are met

Everything else — dashboards, reports, user entity behaviour analytics (UEBA), SOAR integrations — is layered on top.

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