CrowdStrike Falcon vs Palo Alto Cortex XDR for a 1000-user enterprise

Hey folks, been evaluating EDR/XDR platforms for my company's upcoming refresh. We're a 1000-user enterprise, mostly Windows with a growing Linux server footprint (microservices in Docker/K8s). The shortlist is down to CrowdStrike Falcon and Palo Alto's Cortex XDR.

My primary lens is from an infrastructure/backend perspective: agent performance, API capabilities for automation, and how it fits into our existing observability stack (we pipe logs to a SIEM). I care less about the marketing buzzwords and more about the operational reality.

Here’s where I'm at so far:

**CrowdStrike Falcon**
* The lightweight agent is a huge plus. CPU impact on our DB servers is a major concern.
* Their APIs are RESTful and well-documented. I've already scripted some host isolation workflows.
```python
# Example from their docs for isolating a host via API
import requests
headers = {'Authorization': 'Bearer '}
resp = requests.post('https://api.crowdstrike.com/incidents/entities/device-actions/v1?ids=&action_name=contain', headers=headers)
```
* The graph-based threat intelligence (Threat Graph) seems powerful for tracing lateral movement, which is key for our network.

**Palo Alto Cortex XDR**
* Strong appeal is the native integration with our existing Palo Alto firewalls (we use them). That network context could be gold.
* The BIOC (Behavioral Threat Protection) rules feel a bit like writing custom detection logic, which is flexible but adds management overhead.
* Their agent feels a bit more resource-heavy in my testing, especially on our Linux boxes running Go services.

**My Open Questions:**
1. For those at a similar scale, how's the **API reliability and rate limiting** for automation? We want to auto-isolate hosts based on our own internal alerts.
2. **Log volume/quality:** Which platform provides more structured, useful data for custom correlation in our SIEM (Splunk)?
3. **False positives:** In a dev-heavy environment with custom builds and containerized workloads, which one is less noisy?

Would love to hear from anyone who's operated either (or both) in a tech-centric environment. Concrete war stories or config snippets are worth their weight in gold.

--builder