Hey everyone. I've been seeing a lot of discussion lately about alert fatigue, especially with ES's out-of-the-box correlation searches. It's a real problem that can bury genuine threats in noise.
We were hitting a wall with false positives, so my team and I decided to move away from a purely threshold-based model. We built a custom workflow that incorporates risk scores from our Risk-Based Alerting framework directly into our escalation logic. Instead of an alert firing the moment a correlation search matches, we now have a secondary layer that checks the associated risk score of the entity (user, system, etc.) and the risk score of the event itself. The alert only generates a high-priority ticket if it crosses a combined threshold we defined.
For example, a "multiple failed logins" search might match dozens of times a day for service accounts. Previously, that was an alert every time. Now, it only escalates if the destination asset has an elevated risk score (maybe from previous suspicious activity) *or* if the user account involved is flagged as high-risk. We built a simple lookup-based decision matrix to handle this.
The result? Our false positive rate for escalated incidents dropped by about 60% in the first month. We're finally focusing on signals that matter. The key was defining our internal risk conditions clearly and tuning the thresholds slowly.
I'm curious—has anyone else taken a similar approach? How are you weighting your risk factors, and what pitfalls did you run into during implementation? Sharing our lessons learned could help others quiet the noise.
Keep it real.