Rethinking SIEM: Data Lake vs Core Security Analytics

Network flow data is one of the most underutilized sources of telemetry in enterprise security.

Not because it lacks value. NetFlow, sFlow, and IPFix reveal traffic patterns, lateral movement, and network behavior that firewalls, EDR, and cloud security tools simply cannot see. Flow data fills visibility gaps across hybrid networks, especially in regions where deploying traditional security tooling is impractical or impossible.

Teams know this. They understand flow data matters.

The problem is that getting flow data into a SIEM is unnecessarily complex. SIEM vendors don't support flow protocols natively. Teams are left building conversion pipelines, deploying NetFlow collectors, configuring stream forwarders, and wrestling with high-volume ingestion costs. The infrastructure required to make flow data useful often makes it not worth the effort.

So flow data gets deprioritized. The visibility gaps remain.

The Current Reality: Three Bad Options

When it comes to flow data ingestion, most security teams end up choosing between approaches that all have significant downsides:

Option 1: Build conversion layers: Deploy NetFlow collectors, configure forwarders, convert flow records to syslog or HTTP formats that SIEMs can ingest. This approach works, but it's brittle. Conversion pipelines break when devices get upgraded, when flow templates change, when new versions of NetFlow or IPFix are introduced. Each failure creates a blind spot until someone notices and fixes it.

Option 2: Send raw flow data directly to the SIEM: Skip the intermediary layers and point flow exporters straight at the SIEM. The problem? Flow data is high-volume and noisy. Without intelligent filtering and aggregation, raw flow records flood SIEMs with redundant, low-value events. Ingestion costs explode. SIEM performance degrades. Teams end up paying for noise.

Option 3: Skip flow data entirely: Accept the visibility gaps. Rely on what firewalls, endpoints, and cloud logs can show. Hope that lateral movement, data exfiltration, and shadow IT don't happen in the parts of the network you can't see.

None of these options are good. But for most teams, one of these three is reality. The root cause? SIEM vendors have historically treated flow data as an edge case. Most platforms don't support flow protocols natively.

This is where Databahn comes in.

Databahn's Flow Collector: Direct Ingestion, Zero Middleware

Databahn's Flow Collector was built to eliminate the unnecessary complexity of flow data ingestion. Instead of forcing flow records through conversion pipelines or accepting the cost explosion of raw SIEM ingestion, the Flow Collector receives NetFlow, sFlow, and IPFix directly via UDP, normalizes the data to JSON, and applies intelligent filtering before it ever reaches the SIEM.

How It Works

The Flow Collector listens directly on the network for flow records sent over UDP. Point your flow exporters—routers, switches, firewalls—at Databahn's Smart Edge Collector. Configure the source using pre-defined templates for collection, normalization, filtering, and transformation. That's it.

Behind the scenes, the platform handles the complexity:

• Protocol support across versions: NetFlow (v5, v7, v9), sFlow, IPFix — every major flow protocol and version are supported natively. No custom parsers. No version-specific workarounds.

• Automatic normalization: Flow records arrive in different formats with varying field structures. The Flow Collector converts them to a consistent JSON format, making downstream processing straightforward.

• Intelligent volume control: Flow data is noisy. Duplicate records, low-priority flows, redundant session updates, all of this inflates ingestion cost without delivering insight. Databahn filters, aggregates, and deduplicates flow data before it reaches the SIEM, ensuring only relevant, curated events are ingested.

What This Means

Before: Multi-hop architecture. Brittle conversion layers. High-volume SIEM ingestion. Cost explosions. Visibility gaps accepted as inevitable.

After: Direct ingestion. Automatic normalization. Intelligent filtering at the edge. Complete network visibility without operational complexity or runaway costs.

Flow data becomes what it should have been from the start: straightforward, cost-controlled, and foundational to how you see your network.

No More Trade-Offs

Flow data has always been valuable. What’s changed is that collecting it no longer requires accepting operational complexity or budget explosions.

Databahn’s Flow Collector removes those trade-offs. Flow data stops being the thing security teams know they should collect but can’t justify the effort. It becomes what it should have been from the start: straightforward, cost-controlled, and foundational to how you see your network.

The visibility gaps in your network aren’t inevitable. The infrastructure just needed to catch up.

Databahn’s Flow Collector is available as part of the Databahn platform. Want to see how it handles your network architecture? Request a demo or talk to our team about your flow data challenges.

For years, enterprises have been told a comforting story: telemetry is telemetry. Logs are logs. If you can collect, normalize, and route data efficiently, you can support both observability and security from the same pipeline.

At first glance, this sounds efficient. One ingestion layer. One set of collectors. One routing engine. Lower cost. Cleaner architecture. But this story hides a fundamental mistake.

Observability, telemetry, and security telemetry are not simply two consumers of the same data stream. They are different classes of data with distinctintents, time horizons, economic models, and failure consequences.

The issue is intent. This is what we at Databahn call the Telemetry Intent Gap: the structural difference between operational telemetry and adversarial telemetry. Ignoring this gap is quietly eroding security outcomes across modern enterprises.

The Convenient Comfort of ‘One Pipeline’

The push to unify observability and security pipelines didn’t stem from ignorance. It stemmed from pressure. Exploding data volumes and rising SIEM costs which outstrip CISO budgets and their data volumes are exploding. Costs are rising. Security teams are overwhelmed. Platform teams are tired of maintaining duplicate ingestion layers. Enterprises want simplification.

At the same time, a new class of vendors has emerged,positioning themselves between observability and security. They promise a shared telemetry plane, reduced ingestion costs, and AI-powered relevance scoring to “eliminate noise.” They suggest that intelligent pattern detection can determine which data matters for security and keep the rest out ofSIEM/SOAR threat detection and security analytics flows.

On paper, this sounds like progress. In practice, it risks distorting security telemetry into something it was never meant to be.

Observability reflects operational truths, not security relevance

From an observability perspective, telemetry exists to answer a narrow but critical question: Is the system healthy right now? Metrics, traces, and debug logs are designed to detect trends, analyze latency, measure error rates, and identify performance degradation. Their value is statistical. They are optimized for aggregation, sampling, and compression. If a metric spike is investigated and resolved, the granular trace data may never be needed again. If a debug logline is redundant, suppressing it tomorrow rarely creates risk. Observability data is meant to be ephemeral by design: its utility decays quickly, and its value lies in comparing the ‘right now’ status to baselines or aggregations to evaluate current operational efficiency. 

This makes it perfectly rational to optimize observability pipelines for:

·      Volume reduction

·      Sampling

·      Pattern compression

·      Short- to medium-term retention

The economic goal is efficiency. The architectural goal isspeed. The operational goal is performance stability. Now contrast that with security telemetry.

Security telemetry is meant for adversarial truth

Security telemetry exists to answer a very different question: Did something malicious happen – even if we don't yet know what or who it is?

Security telemetry is essential. Its value is not statistical but contextual. An authentication event that appears benign today may become critical evidence two years later during an insider threat investigation. A low-frequency privilege escalation may seem irrelevant until it becomes part of a multi-stage attack chain. A lateral movement sequence may span weeks across multiple systems before becoming visible. Unlike observability telemetry, security telemetry is often valuable precisely because it resists pattern compression.

Attack behavior does not always conform to short-term statistical anomalies. Adversaries deliberately operate below detection thresholds. They mimic normal behavior. They stretch activity over long time horizons. They exploit the fact that most systems optimize for recent relevance. Security relevance is frequently retrospective, and this is where the telemetry intent gap becomes dangerous.

The Telemetry Intent Gap

This gap is not about format or data movement. It is about the underlying purpose of two different types of data. Observability pipelines are meant to uncover and track performance truth, while security pipelines are meant to uncover adversarial truth.

Observability asks: Is this behavior normal? Is the data statistically consistent? Security asks: Does the data indicate malicious intent? In observability, techniques such as sampling and compression to aggregate and govern data make sense. In security, all potential evidence and information should be maintained and accessible, and kept in a structured, verifiable manner. Essentially, how you treat – and, at a design level, what you optimize for – in your pipeline strongly impacts outcomes. When telemetry types are processed through the same optimization strategy, one of them loses. And in most enterprises, the cost of retaining and managing all data puts the organization's security posture at risk.

The Rise of AI-powered ‘relevance’

In response to cost pressure, a growing number of vendors catering to observability and security telemetry use cases claim to solve this problem with AI-driven relevance scoring. Their premise is simple: use pattern detection to determine which logs matter, and drop/reroute the rest. If certain events have not historically triggered investigations or alerts, they are deemed low-value and suppressed upstream.

This approach mirrors observability logic. It assumes that medium-term patterns define value. It assumes that the absence of recent investigations or alerts implies no or low risk. For observability telemetry, this may be acceptable.

For security telemetry, this is structurally flawed. Security detection itself is pattern recognition – but of a much deeper kind. It involves understanding adversarial tradecraft, long-term behavioral baselines and rare signal combination that may never have appeared before. Many sophisticated attacks accrue slowly, and involve malicious action with low-and-slow privilege escalation, compromised dormant credentials, supply chain manipulation, and cloud misconfiguration abuse. These behaviors do not always trigger immediate alerts. They often remain dormant until correlated with events months or years later.

An observability-first AI model trained on short-term usage patterns may conclude that such telemetry is "noise". It may reduce ingestion based on absence of recent alerts. It may compress away low-frequency signals. But absence of investigations is not the absence of threats. Security relevance is often invisible until context accumulates. The timeline over which security data would find relevance is not predictable, and making short and medium-term judgements on the relevance of security data is a detriment to long-horizon detection and forensic reconstruction.

When Unified Pipelines Quietly Break Security

The damage does not announce itself loudly. It appears as:

·      Missing context during investigations

·      Incomplete event chains

·      Reduced ability to reconstruct attacker movement

·      Inconsistent enrichment across domains

·      Silent blind spots

Detection engineers often experience this in terms of fragility: rules are breaking, investigations are stalling, and data must be replayed from cold storage – if it exists. SOC teams lose confidence in their telemetry, and the effort to ensure telemetry 'completeness' or relevance becomes a balancing act between budget and security posture.

Meanwhile, platform teams believe the pipeline is functioning perfectly – it is running smoothly, operating efficiently, and cost-optimized. Both teams are correct, but they are optimizing for different outcomes. This is the Telemetry Intent Gap in action.

This is not a Data Collection issue

It is tempting to frame this as a tooling or ingestion issue. But this isn't about that. There is no inherent challenge in using the same collectors, transport protocols, or infrastructure backbone. What must differ is the pipeline strategy. Security telemetry requires:

·      Early context preservation

·      Relevance decisions informed by adversarial models, not usage frequency

·      Asymmetric retention policies

·      Separation of security-relevant signals from operational exhaust

·      Long-term evidentiary assumptions

Observability pipelines are not wrong. They are simply optimized for a different purpose. The mistake is in believing that the optimization logic is interchangeable.

The Business Consequence

When enterprises blur the line between observability and security telemetry, they are not just risking noisy dashboards. They are risking investigative integrity. Security telemetry underpins compliance reporting, breach investigations, regulatory audits, and incident reconstruction. It determines whether an enterprise can prove what happened – and when.

Treating it as compressible exhaust because it did not trigger recent alerts is a dangerous and risky decision. AI-powered insights without security context will often over index on short and medium term usage patterns, leading to a situation where the mechanics and costs of data collection obfuscate a fundamental difference in business value.

Operational telemetry supports system reliability. Security telemetry supports enterprise resilience. These are not equivalent mandates, and treating them similarly leads to compromises on security posture that are not tenable for enterprise stacks.

Towards intent-aware pipelines

The answer is not duplicating infrastructure. It is designing pipelines that understand intent. An intent-aware strategy acknowledges:

·      Some data is optimized for performance efficiency

·      Some data is optimized for adversarial accountability

·      The same transport can support both, but the optimization logic – and the ability to segment and contextually treat and distinguish this data – is critical

This is where purpose-built security data platforms are emerging – not as generic routers, and not as observability engines extended into security, but as infrastructure optimized for adversarial telemetry from the start.

Platforms designed with security intent as their core – and not observability platforms extending into the security 'use case – do not define the value of data by their recent pattern frequency alone. They are opinionated, have a contextual understanding of security relevance, and are able to preserve and even enrich and connect data to enable long-term reconstruction. They treat telemetry as evidence, not exhaust.

That architectural stance is not a feature. It is a philosophy. And it is increasingly necessary.

Observability and Security can share pipes – not strategy

The enterprise temptation to unify telemetry is understandable. The cost pressures are real. The operational fatigue is real. But conflating optimization logic across observability and security is not simplification. It is misalignment. The future of enterprise telemetry is not a single, flattened data stream scored by generic AI relevance. It is a layered architecture that respects the Telemetry Intent Gap.

The difference between operational optimization and adversarial investigation can coexist and share infrastructure, but they cannot share strategy. Recognizing this difference may be one of the most important architectural decisions security and platform leaders make in the coming decade.

Before starting Databahn, we spent years working alongside large enterprise security teams. Across industries and environments, we kept encountering the same pattern: the increased sophistication of platform and analytics in modernized stacks, matched by the fragility of the security data layer.  

Data is siloed across tools, movement is inefficient, lineage is a mystery that requires investigation. Governance is inconsistent, and management is a manual exercise leaning heavily on engineering bandwidth not being spent on delivering clarity, but in keeping systems going despite obvious gaps. Every new initiative depended on data that was harder to manage than it should have been. It became clear to us that this was not an operational inconvenience but a structural problem.

We started Databahn with a simple conviction: that to improve detection logic, ensure scalable AI implementation, and accelerate and optimize security operations, security data itself has to be made to work. That conviction has driven every decision we have made.

This week, we shared that Databahn has grown by more than 400% year-on-year, with more than half of our customers from the Fortune 500. We are deeply grateful to the enterprises, partners, and team members who have trusted us to solve this challenge alongside them. But the growth and traction are not the headline. It is that the security ecosystem is recognizing what we saw years ago – security data is the foundation of modern security operations.

Our strategy – staying focused

As the market evolves, companies face choices about where to direct their energy. There is always pressure to broaden and extend into adjacencies, or to join up and be absorbed by larger players in the security ecosystem.  

At Databahn, we remain singularly focused on solving the enterprise security data problem. Our customers and partners rely on us to be a best-of-breed solution for security data management, not a competitor attempting to replace parts of their ecosystem with new capabilities that dilute our mission.

Our belief is straightforward: enterprises don’t need another platform to own their stack, a new SIEM to detect threats, or a new Security Data Lake to store telemetry. They have these tools and have built their systems around them. What they need is a solution to make their security data work – not locked in, not siloed, not locked behind formats and schemas that take teams thousands of lines of code to uncover.

It needs to move cleanly across environments to different tools. It needs to be governed and optimized. It should support existing systems without creating friction. Building the security data system that delivers the right security data to the right place at the right time with the right context is the problem we are choosing to solve for our customers.

Enterprise adoption reflects a larger shift

The enterprises choosing Databahn are not experimenting; they are standardizing.  

A Fortune 100 global airline managed a complex SIEM migration in just 6 weeks, while ensuring that complex data types – flight logs, sensors, etc. were seamlessly ingested and managed across the organization. The result was a more resilient and controlled data foundation, ready for AI deployment and optimized for scale and efficiency.  

Sunrun reduced log volume by 70% while improving visibility across its complex and geographically distributed environment. That shift translated into meaningful cost efficiency and stronger signal clarity.  

Becton Dickinson brought structure and governance to its security data, transforming operational complexity of a multi-SIEM deployment into clarity by centralizing their security data into one SIEM instance in just 8 weeks while significantly lowering costs.

Working with these exceptional global teams to turn security data noise into manageable and optimized signal validates our conviction. Our growth is a reflection of this realization taking hold inside the enterprise – security data isn’t working right now, but it can be made to work.

Security Data is now strategic architecture

As enterprises accelerate modernization and AI-driven initiatives, expectations placed on data have fundamentally changed. Security data is no longer exhaust, but it is infrastructure. It is the platform on which the future AI-powered SOC must operate. It must be portable, governed, observable, and adaptable to new systems without forcing architectural trade-offs.  

Enterprises cannot build intelligent workflows on unstable data foundations, where teams can’t trust their telemetry, and so must trust their AI output based on that telemetry even less. Before you layer more intelligence on top of your security stack, you have to fix the data foundation. That’s why AI transformation is being led by Forward Deployment Engineers who are structuring and cleansing data before adding AI solutions on top. Databahn provides that foundation as a platform, delivering flexible resiliency and governance without the manual effort and tech debt.

What comes next

We believe the next chapter of enterprise security will be defined by organizations that treat security data as a strategic asset rather than an operational byproduct. Our commitment is to continue going deeper into solving that core problem. To strengthen partnerships across the ecosystem and help enterprises modernize their security architecture without being forced into unnecessary complexity or locked into a platform that prevents ownership of their data.

The momentum we announced this week is meaningful, but it is just the beginning of a movement. What matters more is what it represents. That enterprises need to make their security data actually work.  

We are excited to continue solving that challenge alongside the leaders driving this shift. The future holds many exciting new partnerships, product development, and other ways we can reduce complexity and increase ownership and value of security data. If any of these challenges seem relatable, we would invite you to get in touch with us to see if we can help.