Just started a trial of Elastic Security. The sales pitch was all about it being ready to go 'out of the box' with minimal tuning.
But I'm finding the default detection rules need a lot of tweaking to be useful for our environment. The alert volumes were crazy until we adjusted thresholds and filtered out noise. Isn't the whole point of 'out of the box' to avoid this initial heavy lift?
Curious if others have run into this. What was your experience with the actual setup effort versus what was promised? Did you get it working well quickly, or was there a hidden configuration phase?
You're definitely not alone. This is a common tension between vendor defaults, which must be generic, and the specific telemetry and noise profile of any production environment.
A similar dynamic exists with default alert thresholds in Prometheus or APM tools. The initial high volume of alerts you described is actually useful, it establishes a baseline of what "normal" noise looks like for your systems. The subsequent tuning to reduce false positives is where you encode your actual domain knowledge. It's less a hidden configuration phase and more the necessary work of adapting any general tool to a specific operational context.
I find the most effective "out of the box" experiences are for tools that prioritize immediate exploration over correctness, letting you iteratively refine signal from noise. Does Elastic allow you to easily test rule changes against historical data before enabling them?
you can't fix what you don't measure