Picture an alert titled “Multiple failed logins then success” in a queue at Northbridge Health, a regional healthcare provider with 900 employees. Someone has to decide whether it is a forgotten password or a stolen one, and prove that decision later. This course teaches you to make that call with Splunk and Elastic (the ELK stack), using evidence instead of instinct.
A SIEM (security information and event management) system collects logs from many systems in one place and raises alerts when activity matches a rule. You work as the analyst who turns each alert into a defensible outcome, meaning closed or escalated, with notes that someone else can check.
Every alert is the end of a chain. Logs arrive from different sources, each using its own field names. The SIEM reshapes them into shared names, a rule compares events across sources, and a match produces an alert for you. Here is the path an alert takes at Northbridge Health:
Each step can go wrong in its own way. A field that did not normalize can hide a user, and a rule can fire on harmless activity. Knowing the chain tells you where to look when an alert seems odd.
An alert is a claim, not a finding. Your job is to check the claim against the underlying logs before you close or escalate it. Good evidence names who, what, where, and when, and points to the log records that show it. Look at this alert summary and notice which details you could verify, and where: