At least one automation rule is configured in Microsoft Sentinel to manage incident response

Overview

Automation rules are Sentinel’s central control plane for incident handling: they fire on incident creation, incident update, or alert creation, evaluate conditions against incident properties (severity, tactics, entities, analytics rule of origin), and execute one or more actions — assign owner, change status, change severity, add tags, suppress duplicates, and run a playbook. Without automation rules, every incident is processed manually by a tier-1 analyst from raw queue: the analyst must triage, assign, set severity, write context, and decide whether to escalate, drastically inflating the mean-time-to-acknowledge (MTTA) and mean-time-to-respond (MTTR). The detection-blind-spot risk is operational: a high-severity incident from a high-fidelity rule (for example, a Defender for Identity DCSync alert correlating with the Microsoft Threat Intelligence map for a known ransomware affiliate; tactic, technique - DCSync) sits unhandled in queue while the threat actor proceeds with privilege escalation and lateral movement. Automation rules also enable noise reduction (auto-close known-benign alerts) so analyst attention concentrates on real incidents. The check confirms at least one automation rule exists. Mature deployments maintain rules that route by analytics-rule, severity, or entity tag.

Remediation

• Create and use Microsoft Sentinel automation rules to manage response
• Automate threat response in Microsoft Sentinel with automation rules

Run it

The check runs as part of the whole assessment, with the ZeroTrustAssessment module installed:

Install-Module ZeroTrustAssessment -Scope CurrentUser
Connect-Maester
Invoke-Maester -Pack ZTA -SkipBuiltIn

Leave out -SkipBuiltIn to run Maester’s own checks in the same run.

About this check

Severity	Medium
Effort to fix	Low
Impact on users	Low
Pillar	SecOps
Category	Security information and event management
Product	Azure
Feature	Microsoft Sentinel
Area	Logging and detection
Licence	Consumption-based: Microsoft Sentinel
Tenant	Workforce

Product, feature, area and ATT&CK are Maester’s: the assessment does not record them, so Maester keeps them in the pack’s taxonomy.json.

A Microsoft check, part of the Zero Trust Assessment pack. Text from ZeroTrustAssessment 3.1.0, © Microsoft, MIT licence.