{
  "id": 8781658,
  "title": "Security Telemetry on a Budget: Building a Practical Elastic Baseline for a Growing Product Team",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/09/20/security-telemetry-on-a-budget-building-a-practical-elastic-baseline",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-09-20T22:00:00.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Dev.to",
    "slug": "dev-to",
    "url": "https://dev.to/bulwark-advisory/security-telemetry-on-a-budget-building-a-practical-elastic-baseline-for-a-growing-product-team-lgb"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "The client was a mid-sized software product company with roughly 70–100 engineers, developing applications, services and infrastructure in the cloud using Kubernetes. They already had a DevOps process in place, cloud and Kubernetes environments, application and platform logs, and an existing Elastic/ELK deployment for troubleshooting and monitoring. However, they lacked a meaningful security telemetry baseline, meaning there was no consistent view of security-related events like failed logins, suspicious access patterns, unexpected container activities, or privilege changes.\n\nThe problem wasn’t the lack of data, but rather the lack of a security-focused approach to existing data. Security teams often excel at monitoring system health, but don’t typically have visibility into security-relevant behavior. Without a clear ownership model, signal quality and response process, a mature security program cannot be built on shaky foundations.\n\nRather than buying a commercial SIEM solution, which would have been expensive and required significant integration effort, the team adopted a pragmatic approach to build a security telemetry baseline using their existing stack. The solution focused on three key objectives: (1) identifying the most valuable security signals for minimal implementation cost, (2) creating a small set of prioritized alerts, and (3) establishing a shared dashboard for engineering and DevOps teams, along with lightweight incident response guidance and clear ownership rules.\n\nThe baseline focused on five practical security categories: identity & access, Kubernetes infrastructure warnings, application ingress events, host/system activity, and cloud activity. By prioritizing these signals, the team gained immediately useful visibility into important events without overwhelming them with excessive data. The end result was a low-cost, low-friction security program that provided a solid foundation for further security initiatives while leveraging the capabilities of the already established Elastic stack.",
  "summary": "Security Telemetry on a Budget How a growing product team turned the Elastic stack it already had into a practical security telemetry baseline — without buying a full SIEM first. DISCLAIMER: This is a real engagement from my professional practice and a project that was successfully completed. The client’s name and identifying details are not disclosed due to an NDA and confidentiality…",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}