Welcome back to Mastering SecOps, a five-part blog series designed to help you fully operationalize Microsoft Sentinel with tools like Sentinel Playbooks. In our last post, we focused on strengthening detection using MITRE ATT&CK and UEBA. Today, let’s dive into a key part of any modern SOC: automation and alert enrichment, enabled by Sentinel Playbooks.
This post explains how to use Sentinel Playbooks to create efficient, automated incident response workflows and how to enrich alerts with threat intelligence to boost decision-making speed.
Why Automate with Sentinel Playbooks?
Security teams constantly face alert fatigue. Relying on manual triage alone slows response and drains your team’s capacity. Microsoft Sentinel Playbooks, powered by Azure Logic Apps, allow your SOC to react instantly when incidents occur. Using Sentinel Playbooks truly transforms response times in security operations.
Use Playbooks to:
- Notify teams via Microsoft Teams, Slack, or email
- Auto-create tickets in ServiceNow, Jira, or Azure DevOps
- Isolate endpoints with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
- Add threat intelligence context to high-risk incidents
📖 Learn more about Sentinel Playbooks
Step 1: Build a Basic Sentinel Playbook
To begin, let’s walk through how to send an email when a high-severity incident triggers:
- Navigate to Microsoft Sentinel > Automation.
- Select + Create Playbook.
- Choose the Blank Playbook or start from the template gallery.
- Add the trigger: “When a response to an Azure Sentinel alert is triggered.”
- Add an action: “Send an email (V2)” using Outlook.
Now, your SOC receives instant alerts without manual effort thanks to Sentinel Playbooks.
📘 Build your first incident-triggered Playbook
Step 2: Automate Ticketing and Containment
Once your first Playbook is working, go further by automating containment or ticket creation using Sentinel Playbooks.
For ticketing:
- Add actions to create incidents in ServiceNow, Jira, or Azure DevOps.
For containment:
- Use Microsoft Defender for Endpoint’s connector to isolate machines directly.
Importantly, you can apply conditional logic to run these steps only for specific threat types, such as ransomware or credential brute-force attacks.
🔗 Use automation rules to trigger Playbooks
Step 3: Enrich Alerts with Threat Intelligence
Next, add value to your incidents using threat intelligence enrichment. Sentinel can pull data from:
- Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence
- MISP feeds
- Paid providers like Recorded Future, Anomali, etc.
With enrichment, you can:
- Validate external IPs or domains
- Tag incidents with threat categories
- Add severity scores or contextual notes
For instance, create a Playbook that queries an IP address in the incident, checks it against Defender TI, and updates the incident’s comment with the threat reputation.
📚 How to use threat intelligence in Sentinel
Final Thoughts
Don’t wait for humans to act when speed matters most. By using Sentinel Playbooks and threat intelligence, your team can automate common workflows and focus on what truly requires human judgment. This shift not only cuts response time but also boosts consistency and confidence in your SOC.
➡️ In the next post, we’ll explore how to build workbooks that visualize detection effectiveness, SOC health, and response SLAs.
If you missed the 1st post in this series, please take a look here or check out other blog posts.
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