Hi everyone, I'm pretty new to Elastic Security and still trying to wrap my head around all the components. I've been setting up our detection rules and keep seeing references to threat intel feeds.
My understanding is that Elastic includes its own threat intelligence, but I also hear teams talk about integrating commercial feeds like Recorded Future. I'm curious about the practical differences.
What are you actually getting with Elastic's built-in feeds versus paying for something like Recorded Future? I'm thinking about coverage—like, does one have more IPs, domains, or malware hashes? And what about the context provided? I've heard some feeds give you details on the threat actor or campaign, which seems super helpful for triage.
Also, how do they compare in terms of update frequency and ease of use within Elastic? I'm cautious about adding complexity if the benefit isn't clear for a team just starting out with security analytics.
Has anyone run both and seen a noticeable difference in alert quality or investigation speed? I'm trying to figure out if this is something we should budget for now or if the built-in feeds are solid enough to start with.
Hey user643, I ran into this same question about a year ago. I'm a security analyst at a mid-sized e-commerce company, and we use Elastic Security as our primary SIEM, with both the built-in threat intel and a Recorded Future feed integrated via their API.
Here's a side-by-side breakdown based on what we measured:
1. **Feed Volume & Type**: Elastic's built-in feeds are primarily IOCs - IPs, domains, hashes. In our setup, it averages about 250k indicators. Recorded Future gives you 2-3x that volume, but more importantly, it includes structured context like threat actor names, campaign IDs, and risk scores. That context was the game-changer for us.
2. **Update Frequency**: The Elastic feeds update on a schedule, typically every few hours. The commercial API feed from Recorded Future is near-real-time; we see new indicators populate in our Elastic indices within 5-10 minutes of their release, which matters for fast-moving phishing or zero-day campaigns.
3. **Integration & Management Effort**: Elastic's feeds are zero-configuration; they just work. Adding Recorded Future required setting up their API connector (about half a day's work) and building a small ingestion pipeline. The ongoing maintenance is low, but it's not *no* maintenance.
4. **Cost & Fit**: Elastic's intel is included with a Security subscription. For Recorded Future, list pricing started around $25k/year for our size, and that was just for the API feed, not their full platform. It's an enterprise-tier cost. The built-in feeds are perfectly solid for getting started and for teams where budget is a primary constraint.
My pick is to start with the built-in Elastic feeds. They're good enough to validate your detection rules and workflows for at least 6-12 months. I'd only budget for a commercial feed now if you have a specific compliance need for real-time updates, or if your team is already overwhelmed by alerts and needs the richer context to speed up triage. To make a clean call, tell us your team's size and what your average "time to close a ticket" is right now.
That point about update frequency is the killer for a lot of shops. The few-hour lag in Elastic's feed is fine for blocking known-bad malware hashes, but useless for catching a fresh phishing domain being spun up.
Our team tried both. The real cost isn't just the Recorded Future license; it's the processing overhead. All that near-real-time, high-volume data can bloat your Elastic indices fast if you're not pruning old IOCs. We ended up tweaking our index lifecycle policy to keep a much shorter retention on the threat intel indices, which added another layer of management.
You get what you pay for, but you also have to *manage* what you get.
- elle
Your point about index bloat is correct. We measured a 40% increase in our daily ingest volume after adding a commercial feed, directly impacting our cluster sizing.
The retention policy tweak is necessary, but it introduces a subtle risk. Pruning IOCs too aggressively can break retrospective detection. If you purge an indicator after 30 days, you can't retroactively match it against a 90-day event window. Your rule tuning becomes a function of your storage budget.
We solved this by moving the threat intel indices to a separate, lower-spec cluster dedicated to enrichment. That decouples the SIEM's performance from the feed volume. The cost trade-off is just different hardware versus different software licensing.