Open-Source SOC Stack with Wazuh, Suricata, Zeek, TheHive

Enterprise SIEM and EDR are priced for organisations that can absorb six-figure annual licences, and a lot of mid-market teams simply can’t. The attackers, of course, don’t lower their effort to match your budget — the need for real visibility is the same whether or not you can afford Splunk.

This Open-Source SOC Stack is built for the team that has engineering talent but not licensing money. Wazuh for the endpoint, Suricata for signature-based network detection, Zeek for deep network visibility, TheHive for case management. Run with genuine operational discipline, it detects most of what the commercial platforms detect. The trade you’re accepting, stated plainly so it isn’t a surprise in month two: you swap a licence fee for an engineering commitment. What a vendor’s support contract, tuned defaults and managed upgrades would have handled becomes your team’s ongoing job.

Why This Matters

This is not plug-and-play, and the “downside” is quietly the biggest upside. Because no vendor is handing you a verdict, your team has to understand why a rule fired, how a log got parsed, and what context makes an alert real or noise. You own the whole chain from agent to case dashboard, which means the knowledge lives in-house instead of in a support contract. The catch is the same fact viewed from the other side: that understanding is mandatory, not optional. A commercial tool lets a junior analyst coast on defaults; this stack won’t. If your team can’t or won’t build that depth, the honest answer is that this isn’t the right stack for you, and paying for a managed platform is the cheaper mistake to avoid.

How It All Fits Together

The stack is modular by design — each tool does one job well and hands off to the next: collect, analyse, detect, respond. That modularity is also what makes it resilient, since you can replace or upgrade any single layer without tearing out the rest. Here’s what each component actually does:

Component	What It Does	How It Works
Wazuh Agent & Manager	Endpoint Security (HIDS/EDR)	Collects OS logs and watches for suspicious changes to critical files. Sends normalized alerts downstream.
Suricata	Network Threat Detection (NIDS)	Inspects network traffic looking for known attack signatures (Emerging Threats ruleset, etc.). Alerts when it finds something.
Zeek	Network Visibility (NDR)	Records protocol-level details: DNS queries, HTTP traffic, TLS certificates. Perfect for hunting and understanding what’s really happening on the wire.
Log Pipeline (Logstash/Filebeat)	Data Collection & Routing	Gathers logs from all sources, enriches them, and sends everything to the central index (Elasticsearch or OpenSearch).
Wazuh Dashboard	Alert Center	Where analysts see alerts, search Zeek metadata, and dig into endpoint details.
TheHive	Case Management	Takes critical alerts and turns them into formal incident cases. Analysts track investigations, add evidence, and document what they did.
Cortex / Shuffle (Optional)	Automation	Looks up indicators against VirusTotal and GreyNoise, and can automatically trigger response actions from TheHive.

What You Can Actually Detect

The coverage lands where it matters, with one honest boundary worth stating: Suricata inspects traffic it can see, so pervasive TLS increasingly blinds signature matching to payloads — which is exactly why Zeek’s metadata (who talked to whom, when, with what certificate) carries so much of the load.

• Endpoint Threats — Wazuh catches suspicious PowerShell, unauthorised scheduled tasks and privilege-escalation attempts — provided command-line auditing is actually enabled on the endpoints, because default Windows logging records the process name and not what it was told to do.

• Network-Level Attacks — Suricata flags known malware C2, cleartext credentials, and exploit traffic against the Emerging Threats ruleset. Strong on the known-bad; by definition blind to anything without a signature yet.

• Hunting & Investigation — Zeek’s DNS logs surface DGA beaconing patterns, and its TLS logs surface the self-signed and oddly-issued certificates attacker tooling tends to use. This is the layer that catches the novel stuff the signatures miss.

• File Changes — File integrity monitoring on /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow and web roots catches unauthorised modification — a new file in a web directory is often the first sign of a planted web shell.

• Compliance — Centralised, tamper-evident logs that provide auditable evidence towards ISO/IEC 27001 and CIS controls. “Contributes evidence towards”, to be precise — the logs support a control, they don’t satisfy one on their own.

How Alerts Become Cases

Detection tools without a process just generate a faster stream of alerts nobody works. What makes this a SOC rather than a pile of dashboards is the workflow the alert travels through:

1. Detection — Suricata matches an HTTP POST against a known malware signature.

2. Alert Created — The alert lands in the Wazuh dashboard and the index.

3. Escalation — An automation rule sees severity High and pushes it to TheHive via webhook. Only the high-severity alerts promote to cases; the rest stay searchable but don’t demand a human, which is what stops the analyst drowning.

4. Case Started — TheHive opens an incident from an “Infected Host” template with the standard investigation steps pre-loaded, so the analyst isn’t reinventing the process under pressure.

5. Analysis — The analyst pivots: Zeek data confirms which connection it was, endpoint logs show which process (say svchost.exe) initiated it. This pivot between network and endpoint context is the core skill the stack demands, and the thing worth training hardest.

6. Response & Close — Wazuh isolates the host, everything is documented in TheHive, the case closes with a record that stands up to review later.

The Operational Trade-offs

Two costs are large enough that pretending otherwise would set you up to fail:

• Initial Tuning — Out of the box, Suricata and Wazuh are loud. The first 30 days are real work: baselining what normal looks like, whitelisting your legitimate vulnerability scanners and backup agents, and killing false positives one rule at a time. This isn’t a setup step you can skip — an untuned stack trains the analyst to click through everything, which is worse than no stack because it manufactures false confidence.

• Storage — Zeek metadata and full logging consume disk alarmingly fast. You need index lifecycle management moving old data to cold storage and eventually deleting it. And know the failure mode before it finds you: when the disk fills, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch flips indices to read-only and ingestion stops silently — no error to the analyst, just dashboards that quietly stop updating while you assume the network went quiet.

What You Get

Beyond the deployed software:

• Architecture Design — Network diagrams, port mappings, and honest compute/storage sizing based on your actual log volume, not a vendor’s optimistic estimate.

• Infrastructure as Code — Ansible playbooks or Docker Compose so the deployment is reproducible and a rebuild is a command, not a week of tribal knowledge.

• Tuned Detection Rules — The rules that survived tuning, documented and mapped to MITRE ATT&CK. Worth reading that coverage map sceptically: it usually counts rules that exist, not rules proven to fire, and the gap between those two is where real detections quietly fail.

• TheHive Templates — Ready-made playbooks for the common incident types — Phishing, Malware, Unauthorised Access — so the process is consistent regardless of who catches the case.

• SOC Training — Practical guides on the network-to-endpoint pivot, which is the skill that separates a functioning SOC from a wall of dashboards nobody knows how to read.

60-Day Implementation Timeline

• Days 1–15: Infrastructure Setup — Provision compute, deploy Wazuh (Manager, Indexer, Dashboard), and stand up the Filebeat/Logstash pipelines. Size storage generously here; running out later is the disruptive failure described above.

• Days 16–30: Deploy Sensors — Wazuh agents onto critical servers, Suricata and Zeek onto network monitoring ports (fed by a SPAN port or TAP — get the capture point right or you’re monitoring a fraction of the traffic and won’t know it), webhooks wired into TheHive. Verify each agent is actually shipping data, not just reporting “connected”.

• Days 31–45: Tuning Phase — The phase that decides whether this succeeds. Baseline the traffic, drown the initial false-positive flood, tune Wazuh FIM and Suricata rules to your environment. Rushing this leaves you with a noisy stack the team learns to ignore.

• Days 46–60: Validation & Handoff — Finalise TheHive templates, run a simulated incident end to end from detection to case closure, and only then hand to operations — with the tuning knowledge documented, because an untended ruleset drifts back into noise within months.

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Run properly, this stack is a genuinely capable defensive platform, not a budget compromise. But “run properly” is load-bearing: it demands engineering skill, disciplined tuning, and a team willing to own the depth. Organisations that commit to that get deep visibility, structured response, and full control over their own security data. Organisations that deploy it and walk away get an expensive way to feel protected while alerts pile up unread — so go in knowing which of those you’re signing up for.