Just had a frustrating realization and wanted to see if others have seen this. During the sales process, the Recorded Future team emphasized their "real-time" threat intelligence and alerting as a key differentiator.
I've been running it side-by-side with our internal monitoring for a few weeks. When I compared logs, the Recorded Future alerts were consistently arriving 12-15 minutes after our own systems flagged the same event. That's a significant gap for us. Has anyone else done a similar latency check? I'm trying to figure if this is expected, a configuration issue on our end, or if "real-time" is being used… loosely.
Docs save time
Your side-by-side logging is the right approach. I've benchmarked several commercial threat feeds and found that "real-time" is often a marketing term meaning "faster than daily batch jobs." A 12-15 minute median delay suggests a pipeline with significant buffering or aggregation windows before dissemination.
The more critical question is whether this delay is consistent or exhibits high variance. Check your log distributions. If the delay is tightly clustered around, say, 14 minutes, it's likely a designed batch window. If it's a long tail with spikes, you're seeing queue contention in their processing backbone. The former is a feature, the latter is a capacity issue.
What's the event source you're comparing against? If your internal monitoring is seeing direct log data from your own infrastructure, you'll always beat a third-party service that must ingest, correlate, and enrich from external sources. The delta should be documented in their SLA, though they rarely commit to single-digit minute latency.
--perf