Stop Counting Alerts, Start Measuring Value

Security July 31, 2026 Owen Trimble , Jamie Windley

Key takeaways

Security value is measured by reducing risk and improving business outcomes, not by tracking more alerts, data, or platform activity.
Understanding technology, people, and process costs helps show where security investments improve efficiency and reduce unnecessary work.
Metrics like faster threat detection, fewer low value alerts, and more time for proactive security work clearly demonstrate business value.

What Do We Mean by Value?

When we talk about "value," we don't mean the information assigned to a field in your log data; no key-value pairs in this post. We mean value in the sense that what keeps leadership awake at night: return on investment, business outcomes, and whether their investment is actually buying security.

Between the two of us, one working as a Splunk Security Technical Account Manager (TAM), and the other as a Splunk Customer Success Executive (CSE), we have sat alongside hundreds of security teams of every size and maturity level. The teams doing excellent security work are often the least equipped to articulate it. This blog is our attempt to change that.

What Value Is Not

Before we get to what good looks like, it helps to be direct about the traps we see teams fall into most often.

Measuring Activity Instead of Outcomes

Alert volume, number of enabled detections, total data ingested, MITRE ATT&CK coverage percentages: these are easy to track and genuinely useful for operational purposes, but they are poor proxies for security value. As the Splunk blog "Built for Speed, Stuck in Neutral" puts it, well-intentioned metrics become misleading when they measure the wrong things.

"On MITRE ATT&CK coverage specifically: MITRE ATT&CK is a threat intelligence framework, not a SOC operating model. You do not detect T1135. You detect specific behaviours in your environment that may map to that technique. A colourful coverage matrix is useful context, not a security posture."

Confusing Adoption with Value

Adoption metrics (users logging in, use cases enabled, data sources onboarded) are helpful leading indicators: they tell you whether the platform is being used, not whether it is delivering security outcomes. The Insights Suite for Splunk (IS4S) and its Value Insights feature surface many of these signals automatically, translating platform activity into FTE hours saved and dollars protected without manual effort.

If your team has not configured Risk-Based Alerting (RBA), that is an important flag to act on. But high RBA adoption is still not value on its own. Value comes from what happens next: are threats detected faster? Is analyst time reallocated toward higher-order work?

Equating Ingestion with Impact

If you cannot trace a data source back to a specific security use case or business outcome, you are spending license and storage budget without generating security results. The same logic applies to use cases: a detection running in production, consuming Splunk resources, but no longer mapped to a current threat or business risk is an overhead, not an asset. Mature Splunk Enterprise Security operations include the active lifecycle management of detections: building, tuning, and retiring them as the threat landscape and business context evolve.

Understanding Your True Cost of Ownership

Before demonstrating value, you need to understand what you are spending. TCO in a security context has three components.

Technology Cost

This is more than your Splunk license. ES Essentials unifies core SIEM and detection workflows; ES Premier goes further, natively integrating SOAR and UEBA alongside threat intelligence, consolidating point solutions that your team is paying for separately today. Every point solution you decommission is a cost removed from your TCO calculation, and Splunk Enterprise Security Premier extends that further into a seamless, AI-powered platform.

People Cost

Analyst time is one of your most expensive and most constrained resources. A simple calculation illustrates the challenge: 1,000 alerts per day at ten minutes each equates to roughly 167 analyst hours; this is not sustainable. Whether that workload is absorbed by an existing team or requires additional staffing, alert volume has a direct impact on the total cost of operating a SIEM. Risk-Based Alerting (RBA) addresses this directly, with documented alert volume reductions of 50 to 90 percent across customer deployments, freeing analysts to shift from reactive triage to proactive threat hunting.

Process Cost

How much engineering time goes into keeping things running versus delivering security outcomes? If detection engineers are spending most of their time maintaining existing rules, managing data pipeline issues, and handling ad hoc requests, that is process cost eroding your security investment.

The tell is a detection engineering team that spends most of its time reacting instead of building new detections against current threats. Splunk reduces this in three ways: Enterprise Security Content Updates (ESCU) deliver maintained, threat-informed detections so engineers aren't building and tuning every rule from scratch; Federated Search and Data Manager cut the manual overhead of onboarding and maintaining data pipelines; SOAR playbooks absorb the repeatable, ad hoc work that would otherwise land on a platforms engineer's desk.

Outcome-Focused Security Metrics

With TCO as context, the most valuable security metrics are the ones that demonstrate reduced risk, improved operational efficiency, or better utilisation of security spend. The question is not "How much security activity are we generating?" but "Are we reducing exposure while using people, technology, and data more effectively?"

The table below highlights some of the metrics we have found most useful in customer engagements. For detailed guidance on calculating and operationalising these metrics in Splunk Enterprise Security, see Splunk's SOC Metrics and KPIs guide and Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) explainer.

Metric

What It Measures

Why It Matters to the Business

Mean Time to Detect (MTTD)

Average time from an event occurring to its detection by the SOC.

Measures your exposure window. Every hour of reduction limits the potential blast radius and cost of a breach.

Mean Time to Respond (MTTR) by Asset Criticality

Time from detection to containment, segmented by business criticality of affected systems.

Correlates directly to cost of downtime. Faster containment on crown jewel assets means lower financial and reputational impact.

Signal-to-Noise Ratio

The proportion of raw alerts that result in genuine incidents requiring analyst action.

Quantifies noise reduction. A higher ratio demonstrates that tuning and RBA are improving analyst efficiency and reducing operational cost.

Alert Disposition Breakdown per Detection

The proportion of each detection's alerts resolving as true positives (genuine suspicious/malicious activity), benign positives (target behaviour, but legitimate), and false positives (the detection fired on activity it wasn’t designed to catch).

Separates noise by root cause: false positives flag logic that needs re-engineering; benign positives flag detections needing tuning or enrichment. Shows where analyst time is lost and which detections to prioritise.

Analyst Effort Saved Through Automation

The volume of manual triage, enrichment, and response actions handled automatically, expressed as analyst hours reclaimed.

Converts automation directly into recovered capacity and cost. Ties technology spend to a measurable outcome, analyst time freed for higher-value work, rather than automation activity for its own sake.

Translating Metrics into Business Language

Security teams are often technically fluent but struggle to communicate value to executive audiences. The challenge isn't collecting metrics, it's explaining why they matter. Here are a few examples of how technical outcomes can be translated into business language.

"Risk-Based Alerting reduced alert volume by 70% without reducing true positives."

Translates to: Our SOC now spends significantly less time triaging low-value alerts, creating additional analyst capacity for proactive threat hunting and higher-value investigations.

"MTTD improved from 72 hours to 6 hours."

Translates to: The window in which an attacker can operate undetected has been reduced by over 90%, lowering the potential business impact and cost of a security incident.

"Signal-to-noise ratio improved from 1:200 to 1:15."

Translates to: Analysts spend more time investigating genuine threats and less time chasing noise, improving both operational efficiency and confidence in the detection programme.

"Analyst time shifted from alert triage to proactive threat hunting."

Translates to: Security resources are being used to strengthen the organisation's security posture rather than simply keeping pace with incoming alerts.

"Every onboarded data source is mapped to a defined security use case."

Translates to: Every licence dollar supports a measurable security outcome, improving governance and demonstrating that security investment is aligned to business priorities.

Building Your Value Story

Start measuring now, even imperfectly. Pick two or three of the metrics in the table above, establish a baseline today, and track them regularly. Use Splunk's maturity assessments (e.g. Success Framework or Prescriptive Value Path (PVP)) to benchmark where you stand and identify the next step in your SOC's evolution.

The metrics are only half the story. The real value comes from explaining what those metrics mean for the business. When security outcomes are translated into business outcomes, it becomes much easier to demonstrate the return on your Splunk investment, justify future investment, and show how the SOC contributes to reducing organisational risk. If you're a Splunk customer ready to build that value story, your Customer Success team is the right place to start.

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