50 XSIAM Engineer Practice Questions: Question Bank 2025

A security team is designing an XSIAM deployment and wants the platform to automatically correlate alerts, endpoint activity, and network logs into a single incident view. Which XSIAM capability primarily provides this outcome?

You onboard a new log source into XSIAM, but searches show the events are not appearing in the expected normalized fields (for example, source IP and username are empty). What is the most likely cause?

In an XSIAM playbook, you want to ensure an investigation step runs only if the incident severity is High and the incident contains an endpoint hostname. Which playbook element is best suited to implement this logic?

An analyst needs to restrict who can close incidents in XSIAM while still allowing other users to view and comment. Which feature should be used to enforce this?

A SOC wants to onboard AWS CloudTrail logs into XSIAM and ensure the logs are searchable quickly for detections. Which approach is generally recommended?

A playbook includes a step to block an IP address. The SOC requires that any blocking action must be approved by an on-call lead to reduce the risk of disrupting business traffic. What is the best playbook design?

You are troubleshooting why a third-party integration action in a playbook is failing with authentication errors. Other playbook tasks run successfully. What should you verify first in XSIAM?

A customer wants to reduce detection noise by suppressing repeated low-fidelity alerts from a known benign scanner, but still wants the raw logs ingested for hunting. Which is the best approach?

A playbook needs to enrich an incident by querying an external threat intelligence service for hundreds of indicators in a single incident. The current design performs one API call per indicator and frequently hits rate limits. What is the best redesign?

After onboarding a high-volume firewall log source, the SOC notices increased ingestion lag and delayed detections. They still need complete logs, but want detections to run on the most security-relevant subset with minimal delay. Which design is most appropriate?

An analyst wants to quickly verify whether a specific endpoint is currently active and what user is logged in, directly from an alert investigation. Which XSIAM capability best supports this task?

A team is onboarding a new log source and wants the data to be usable in detections with minimal custom parsing. What is the recommended approach in XSIAM?

A playbook must branch based on whether an IP address in an alert is private (RFC1918) or public. Which playbook design is most appropriate?

After onboarding firewall logs, analysts notice events appear in XSIAM but do not populate key fields used by built-in detections (for example, source IP and destination IP are empty in normalized fields). What is the most likely cause?

You need a playbook to automatically open a ticket only when an incident severity is High or Critical AND the incident is not already linked to an existing ticket. What is the best implementation approach?

A customer requires that certain log types (for example, authentication events) be queryable immediately for investigations, while less critical telemetry can tolerate delayed availability. Which ingestion design best aligns with this requirement?

A playbook enriches a URL using multiple threat intelligence integrations. Sometimes one integration is temporarily unavailable and causes the entire playbook to fail. What is the best practice to make the automation resilient?

Analysts report that some incidents contain duplicate alerts that should have been grouped together, increasing triage workload. Which configuration area should you review first to address this?

Your organization wants to minimize outbound connectivity from endpoints while still enabling endpoint-based response actions (such as isolate host) triggered by playbooks. Which architecture decision best supports this requirement?

A detection relies on joining endpoint process events with identity authentication events within a time window. The customer reports inconsistent results, especially around daylight saving changes. Which data onboarding/configuration issue is the most likely root cause?

Your team wants to restrict which users can create or modify playbooks, while still allowing junior analysts to run playbooks and view case data. Which approach best aligns with XSIAM best practices?

You onboard a new log source and notice many events are being stored, but they are not contributing to detections because fields such as source IP and username are not normalized. What is the most appropriate next step?

An engineer wants to validate a new playbook without impacting production cases. Which method is the safest way to test it?

A customer must keep raw log data in their own environment for compliance but still wants XSIAM to run detections using a subset of normalized security events. Which onboarding design best meets this requirement?

You built an enrichment playbook that calls an external threat intel API. During high-volume incidents, the API rate limit is exceeded and the playbook fails intermittently. What is the best improvement to make the automation more resilient?

After onboarding a cloud audit log source, analysts complain about duplicate events increasing investigation noise. What is the most appropriate remediation in XSIAM?

A new automated response should only run when an alert is high severity AND the destination domain has a high threat score. Where should this logic be implemented for best maintainability?

A detection uses user identity context, but alerts show 'unknown user' even though authentication logs are onboarded. Which troubleshooting step is most likely to identify the root cause?

Your organization wants to allow analysts to use a new custom integration command inside playbooks, but security requires that only approved commands can run and only against approved targets. What is the most appropriate design?

A customer experiences intermittent gaps in log ingestion from a remote site. Network connectivity is unreliable, but compliance requires eventual delivery of all security logs once connectivity is restored. Which architecture approach best addresses this requirement?

An analyst wants to quickly validate whether a specific IP is known to XSIAM and what related alerts and incidents exist. Which XSIAM feature is best suited for this task?

A new data source is being onboarded. The team wants to minimize time-to-value by ensuring events are normalized so detections and playbooks can work consistently across sources. What is the recommended approach?

A playbook step calls an external API that sometimes times out. What is the best practice to make the playbook resilient without generating duplicate actions?

A team wants to give Tier 1 analysts the ability to run playbooks but prevent them from editing automation content. Which control best meets this requirement?

During onboarding of a Windows event stream, detections that rely on the username field are not triggering. Raw events show usernames, but the normalized field is empty. What is the most likely cause?

A playbook is designed to isolate an endpoint when a high-severity incident is created. The customer wants a human approval step only for incidents involving executive users, while all other incidents should isolate automatically. Which design is most appropriate?

A customer wants to onboard firewall logs from multiple regions and ensure searching and detection correlation works consistently regardless of source. Which approach best supports consistent correlation at scale?

After enabling a new integration, the SOC sees a surge of duplicate alerts that appear to represent the same activity from two ingestion paths. What is the best next step to reduce duplicates while preserving visibility?

A playbook updates an incident field based on an enrichment result, but it intermittently overwrites a more recent value entered by an analyst. What is the best solution?

A large enterprise plans an XSIAM deployment where some log sources cannot reach the internet directly. They still require reliable ingestion and the ability to scale onboarding. Which architecture choice best fits this constraint?

An analyst needs to validate that endpoint telemetry from a subset of hosts is successfully reaching XSIAM. Which approach is the MOST direct way to confirm ingestion for those specific hosts?

A team wants a playbook to enrich indicators and automatically block only those with high confidence, while allowing an analyst to approve medium-confidence items. Which playbook design best meets this requirement?

Which statement BEST describes a recommended operational practice for reducing accidental impact from automation in XSIAM?

After onboarding a new log source, your searches return inconsistent field names for the same concept (e.g., "src_ip", "source_ip", "client_ip"). What is the BEST next step to improve detection content reliability?

A playbook is configured to run on 'Incident Created'. However, some incidents appear without the playbook executing. The incident type is 'Phishing', but the playbook trigger is set to 'All incident types'. What is the MOST likely reason?

Your SOC wants to reduce duplicate incidents that represent the same underlying activity occurring across multiple alerts. Which configuration approach is MOST appropriate?

A customer must keep raw logs for long-term retention but wants fast search performance for the most recent data. Which data management strategy BEST aligns with this requirement?

A playbook uses an external threat intel enrichment integration. During a network outage, the enrichment step fails and the playbook stops, preventing subsequent containment actions. What is the BEST playbook improvement?

An organization requires that only private network ranges are considered 'internal' for entity relationships and incident logic. Public cloud IPs used by the company must be treated as 'external'. Which approach is MOST appropriate to implement this requirement in XSIAM?

You need to design a deployment where multiple business units share the same XSIAM tenant, but data visibility and administrative permissions must be strictly separated. Which design best satisfies this requirement?