MDR · 3 MIN READ · SARAH CRONE · OCT 2, 2025 · TAGS: tech stack
TL;DR
- Integration counts don’t equate to better security–quantity isn’t the same as quality
- Quality detection engineering is the key to orchestrating alerts that matter
- Work outside the box of standard vendor detections by using API integrations to create helpful alerts for your team
The cybersecurity industry has a numbers problem. We’ve become obsessed with the wrong metrics, treating our security stack like a Pokémon collection—gotta catch ’em all. Vendors brag about having “300+ integrations” or “10,000 detection rules” as if quantity automatically translates to quality. Meanwhile, security teams are drowning in alerts, burning out analysts, and still getting breached.
It’s time for an uncomfortable truth: Your integration count is a vanity metric that’s actively making you less secure.
The integration theater
Walk into any security conference and you’ll hear the same pitch over and over: “We integrate with everything!” Vendors wave around their partner logos like championship banners. CISOs nod approvingly at demos showing sprawling architecture diagrams with dozens of connected boxes.
But here’s what nobody talks about: many of those integrations are shallow, noisy, and counter-productive. They’re not making you more secure—they’re making you more overwhelmed.
Think about it. When was the last time you actually used all 50 of your SIEM’s “supported integrations”? How many of those fancy dashboard widgets are just generating busywork for your analysts? How many alerts are you closing without investigation because you know they’re almost always false positives?
All of a sudden you find that your security program is actually just an alert factory.
The coverage blindness
The real headache isn’t just the noise—it’s what you’re missing while your team is distracted by it. Security leaders get so focused on connecting everything that they forget to ask the fundamental question: What am I actually trying to detect?
Here’s a thought experiment: You have two options.
Option A: 100 integrations that generate 50,000 events per day with a 0.1% true positive rate. That’s 50 real threats buried in 49,950 pieces of noise.
Option B: 10 carefully chosen integrations that generate 1,000 events per day with a 5% true positive rate. That’s still 50 real threats, but with only 950 false positives.
Which team do you think is more likely to catch the sophisticated attacker? Which team is more likely to burn out from alert fatigue?
The dirty little secret is that most “comprehensive” security stacks have massive blind spots in their coverage. You might have 15 different ways to detect malware, but zero visibility into cloud privilege escalation. You might catch every port scan, but miss the insider threat exfiltrating data through legitimate APIs.
TL;DR: breadth without depth is just expensive noise.
The engineering problem
Real security isn’t just data collection, it’s about how that data is interpreted. Every additional integration without proper engineering and detections backing it up is just another fire hose pointed at your analysts.
The security teams that actually stop advanced threats don’t have more tools. They have better detection engineering. They’ve shifted their mentality to take a more surgical approach:
- They ingest data with purpose, not just because they can
- They normalize and enrich events so context travels with every alert
- They build detections around attacker techniques, not vendor marketing
- They correlate signals across surfaces to tell complete stories
This isn’t about AI or machine learning or the latest buzzword. It’s about applying basic engineering principles to turn overwhelming data streams into actionable intelligence.
It’s time to ask the hard questions
The most mature security programs we see aren’t the ones with the most integrations. They’re the ones that are most selective about what they ingest and most disciplined about how they engineer their detections.
When deciding where to focus their resources they ask hard questions:
- Will this data source improve our detection confidence or just add noise?
- Can we enrich and normalize this data consistently with our existing stack?
- Does this fill a gap in our MITRE ATT&CK coverage or just duplicate existing capabilities?
- Will our analysts be more effective with this integration, or just more overwhelmed?
They focus on metrics that matter: signal-to-noise ratio, mean time to triage, detection coverage across attack techniques, and analyst productivity on high-value work.
Most importantly, they understand that security is an engineering discipline, not a procurement exercise.
What’s next?
Your security stack fails when your integrations don’t work together intelligently. You have to stop treating your security program like a collector’s hobby and start treating it like an engineering challenge.
At Expel, we’ve built our entire MDR platform around this principle—taking an API-first approach to work with your existing security investments and transforming siloed alerts into the high-fidelity detections your team actually needs to stop threats. Yes, we have a vast integration ecosystem, but we don’t just rely on vendor-written detections (that are predictable and far from comprehensive).
We understand that what matters isn’t how many tools you have—it’s how well they work together to give your team the clarity and confidence they need to protect what matters most.
