Alright, let's wade into the warm, comforting waters of vendor-defined automation. I've been elbows-deep in Vision One for the better part of a year, ostensibly for its "orchestration" capabilities. The marketing sings a siren song of seamless, intelligent SOAR. The reality, I'm afraid, feels more like trying to perform a symphony with a player piano that only has one, very loudly pre-punched roll.
My core gripe: the automation workflows are astonishingly brittle when you step outside the happy path of straightforward, linear playbooks. The visual builder is pleasant enough for "if alert A, then run script B, then send email C." But the moment you need to introduce meaningful decision logic, statefulness, or external coordination, you hit a wall of rigidity. It's like they built a highway for golf carts and called it a solution for all terrestrial transport.
Take a seemingly simple requirement: an automated investigation that needs to gather context from our internal CMDB, then based on asset criticality and the type of threat, branch into different containment strategies—some might require a human ticket, others an automated isolation, others just a tag. In Vision One, you're immediately forced into a Rube Goldberg machine of individual "Automation" nodes. Each branch becomes a separate chain, state sharing is a nightmare (hello, clumsy use of the incident's "notes" or custom fields as a pseudo-database), and error handling is an afterthought. There's no real concept of a workflow *engine*—it's a sequential executor with some basic conditional forks.
Where's the compensation logic? What if the CMDB query times out? Can I easily define a retry with exponential backoff? Can I suspend the workflow and wait for an external event (like a human approval from a separate system)? The answer, in practice, is a resounding "you can try, but you'll be writing more glue code in their script nodes than you would have just building a modest Lambda function yourself." It promotes a facade of automation that cracks under the slightest pressure of real-world complexity.
This feels like a classic case of a security vendor checking the SOAR box without embracing the architectural principles that make orchestration actually work. Where are the durable execution contexts? The event-driven capabilities? The proper primitives for parallel execution and joining? It's 2024. We talk about event sourcing and saga patterns for our own apps, yet we accept this linear, fragile scripting interface for our critical security operations. The irony is palpable.
I suspect this rigidity is why so many implementations I've seen end up using Vision One mostly for aggregation and alerting, with the "heavy" automation happening in a separate, custom-built service. That, of course, defeats the entire purpose and introduces its own nightmare of integration sprawl. So, are we all just pretending this is fine, or has anyone actually managed to bend this into a shape that handles genuinely complex, multi-system processes without becoming an unmaintainable tangle of scripts? I'm genuinely curious. 🤷
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