If you’ve ever been part of a SIEM migration project, you know exactly what I’m talking about when I say it’s one of the most challenging and resource-intensive projects a security team can undertake. The manual effort involved in translating hundreds of detection rules, mapping data sources, and ensuring operational continuity while maintaining security posture can take anywhere from 12 to 15 months. That’s over a year of cross-team coordination, validation, and hoping you haven’t missed something critical.
Microsoft just made this significantly easier.
At Ignite 2025, Microsoft unveiled their AI-powered SIEM migration experience for Sentinel, and they’ve now expanded support to include QRadar alongside the initial Splunk support. This isn’t just another migration tool that does basic syntax translation. What caught my attention is how they’ve approached this with intent-based mapping and continuous optimization to deliver what they’re calling a “future-ready SOC.”
Not just syntax
Traditional SIEM migration tools have typically focused on translating query syntax from one platform to another. That’s useful, but it’s only scratching the surface. Microsoft’s approach goes deeper by analyzing uploaded legacy SIEM data and matching techniques and rules to Sentinel’s out-of-the-box detections. The tool suggests missing connectors to ensure complete coverage, which addresses one of the biggest pain points in migration projects - the fear of losing visibility.
The experience is built around four foundational pillars:
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Discovery & Planning: The tool identifies your existing SIEM detections and helps plan a phased migration using guided, trackable use-cases.
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Detections: This is where the AI really shines. It identifies, matches, recommends, fine-tunes and enables detections available in Sentinel OOTB to recreate and exceed your origin SIEM’s threat detection coverage.
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Data Sources: The experience identifies, matches and recommends enablement of data connectors based on recommended detections and similar customers’ data connector usage patterns.
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Holistic SOC Engineer Experience: A comprehensive, phased onboarding and migration process with progress tracking, onboarding targets, and SOC optimization enhancements.
How It Actually Works
The migration experience follows a logical workflow that reduces the complexity:
Step 1: Discovery
You start by uploading your exported SIEM configurations. Instead of manually analyzing spreadsheets and configuration files, the tool ingests this data and builds an actionable inventory of your existing environment. This automated discovery eliminates one of the most error-prone steps in traditional migrations.
Step 2: Analysis
The AI-powered engine then evaluates the progress and outcomes of the migration recommendations. This provides visibility into the quality and completeness of recommendations, allowing you to validate that all critical detections have been accounted for before moving forward.
Step 3: Guided Migration Planning
SIEM migrations aren’t one-time events, they’re phased journeys. The experience provides a stateful, guided migration plan aligned to Sentinel solutions and SOC use cases. You can track progress, prioritize work, and collaborate across stakeholders with full transparency throughout the migration lifecycle.
Step 4: Detection Mapping
This is where things get interesting. The tool uses AI-assisted analysis to match your existing SIEM detections to Microsoft Sentinel analytics rules. It highlights supported mappings and gaps clearly, focusing on high-confidence, maintainable mappings that help you migrate faster while building trust in the outcome.
Step 5: Data Connector Enablement
Detections are only effective when the right data is connected. The experience automatically identifies and recommends the data connectors required to activate your selected analytics rules, removing guesswork from the onboarding process.
Step 6: Continuous Optimization
Beyond migration, the experience integrates with SOC Optimization to provide a unified view of migration progress alongside ongoing optimization recommendations. This helps you move seamlessly from migration into continuous improvement.
My Trial Run
I wanted to test this out myself to see how it actually works in practice. I spun up my test environment and navigated to the SOC Optimization section in the Microsoft Defender portal. The interface is clean and intuitive, immediately presenting your optimization data with visual insights into your current SOC coverage.
When I clicked to set up a new SIEM, I was greeted with a straightforward wizard that explains the prerequisites. The main requirement is that Security Copilot must be enabled on the tenant. Here’s something worth noting - while Security Copilot must be enabled, the SIEM migration experience itself doesn’t consume Security Compute Units (SCUs), so there’s no additional cost for using it.
The next step asks you to upload configuration data from your current SIEM. The tool supports both Splunk and QRadar exports. You select which SIEM you’re migrating from, and the interface provides guidance on what data format is expected. In my test environment, I selected Splunk as the source, and the tool was ready to accept the configuration export.
Unfortunately, this is where my trial hit a roadblock. While I have access to test Sentinel workspaces, I didn’t have a Security Copilot licence enabled in my test tenant at the time. The tool clearly indicates this as a prerequisite, and without it, I couldn’t proceed to upload the SIEM configuration data or see the AI-powered analysis in action.
Even though I couldn’t complete the full workflow, what I saw was promising. The interface is clearly designed to reduce complexity and guide you through each phase of the migration. The fact that Microsoft has embedded this directly into the Defender portal alongside SOC Optimization shows they’re thinking about migration not as a one-off project, but as part of an ongoing security operations lifecycle.
The AI Advantage
The experience is powered by Security Copilot, bringing AI-assisted reasoning directly into the migration workflow. During private preview and early customer engagements, Microsoft reports some impressive results:
- Significantly higher detection match rates compared to previous tools
- Improved accuracy and trust through conservative, high-confidence recommendations
- Reduced onboarding timelines by months, not weeks
- Up to 50% reduction in overall migration time
Customer feedback consistently highlights how the experience makes complex migrations more approachable, transparent, and easier to plan and execute.
Why This Matters
SIEM migration projects have historically been delayed or avoided because of their complexity and risk. Organizations stick with legacy systems longer than they should simply because the migration overhead seems insurmountable. By using AI to automate the discovery, analysis, and mapping phases, Microsoft is removing significant friction from the process.
What’s particularly clever is how they’ve tied this into the broader SOC Optimization framework. Migration isn’t treated as a separate, isolated project. Instead, it’s integrated into a continuous improvement cycle that extends beyond go-live. This approach recognizes that SOC maturity is an ongoing journey, not a destination.
For security teams managing Splunk or QRadar environments and considering a move to cloud-native SIEM, this tool significantly lowers the barrier to entry. The fact that eligible customers can receive hands-on assistance through Microsoft’s Cloud Accelerate Factory Program, alongside their preferred partner, adds another layer of support to reduce risk.
Getting Started
If you want to try this yourself, here’s what you need:
- Enable Microsoft Sentinel in the Microsoft Defender portal
- Enable Security Copilot in your tenant
- Navigate to SOC Optimization → Set up your new SIEM
- Upload your Splunk or QRadar exported SIEM configuration data and follow the guided experience
Microsoft has published detailed documentation on the process: Use the SIEM migration experience - Microsoft Sentinel
Final Thoughts
SIEM migrations have always been complex, but they don’t have to be as painful as they’ve historically been. Microsoft’s AI-powered migration experience represents a significant step forward in making cloud SIEM adoption more accessible. By automating the most tedious and error-prone parts of the migration process while providing transparency and guidance throughout, they’re addressing real pain points that have held organizations back from modernizing their security operations.
If you’re currently planning a SIEM migration or have been putting one off because of the complexity involved, this is definitely worth exploring. The combination of AI-assisted analysis, guided workflows, and integration with ongoing SOC optimization could be exactly what your team needs to make that move to Sentinel.
Microsoft is hosting a webinar on February 2, 2026 at 9:00AM PT for those interested in learning more about the SIEM migration capabilities. Registration link
Have you tried the new migration experience? I’d love to hear about your experience in the comments.