SIEM Waste Report 2026

Paying for Silence

47% of billed SIEM data isn't being used. We measured live customer SIEMs, checking every event class against every enabled detection, saved search and dashboard, to find out which data is actually read and what the rest costs.

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Cover of Paying for Silence: Spectrum Security's SIEM Waste Report 2026. 47% of billed SIEM data isn't being used.

Inside the report

  • What unused SIEM data costs at your ingest volume: $343K a year for every terabyte a day, at a conservative $2 per GB.
  • Waste by SIEM product and estate size, across CrowdStrike, Microsoft Sentinel, Google SecOps and Splunk.
  • The ten waste patterns that recurred across unrelated organizations, ranked by what they cost.
  • Short stories of waste, including the script that cost $3.3M a year.
  • Why cutting waste rarely breaks detection: about 3 in 100 cuts touched a rule.
  • Five steps to get the money back, starting Monday.