Pre-SIEM log filtering and log reduction means dropping, trimming, deduplicating, or rerouting log events before they cross your SIEM’s ingest boundary. The work happens on the collecting agent or on a relay, not inside the SIEM. Most commercial SIEMs bill on the volume they ingest, in gigabytes per day or events per second, so every byte you remove upstream is a byte you never pay to index, store, or search.

Analytics Logs is Microsoft Sentinel’s full-featured tier: analytics rules, any query scope, query cost included in the ingestion price, and up to 90 days of interactive retention at no additional charge. Basic Logs cuts the ingestion price to under a quarter of Analytics, in exchange for per-GB query charges, a fixed 30-day interactive window, workspace-only query scope, and no analytics rules. Since September 2026, Basic tables support full KQL, including joins across tables.

Microsoft Sentinel charges by the gigabyte for most data you ingest into the analytics tier. To reduce Microsoft Sentinel ingest cost, drop events you never query, remove fields you don’t use, and route high-volume, low-value logs to the cheaper data lake tier. This article walks through how to do each of these with NXLog Agent configurations and KQL you can adapt for your environment. Lever Where it runs What it saves Trade-off Drop noisy events

We are happy to announce the latest release of NXLog Platform, version 1.15. This update lets you export log search results for offline analysis, gives you clearer visibility into agent connectivity, and makes it easier to manage agent configurations programmatically. NXLog Agent 6.16 supports more reliable macOS log collection and automatic format detection for incoming telemetry data. Read on for more details about these updates. Export log search results for offline analysis and reporting NXLog Platform 1.

Short answer: Splunk meters the raw bytes that reach its indexing pipeline, so you reduce Splunk ingest cost by stopping low-value data before that point. Fix noisy audit policies at the source, filter events by ID and pattern at the endpoint, remove fields you don’t search, collapse repeats, and route archive-only telemetry data to cheaper storage. Compression alone does not lower the meter. Splunk bills climb because every event arrives at full size, including the ones nobody searches.

Kubernetes DaemonSet log collection runs one log-collector pod on every node in your cluster. The collector reads all container logs from the node’s /var/log/containers directory through read-only hostPath mounts and forwards them to your SIEM, with no changes to your application pods. When the cluster adds a node, the DaemonSet adds a collector, so coverage scales automatically. This guide shows you how the pattern works, how Kubernetes writes container logs in 2026, and how to deploy NXLog Agent as a DaemonSet that ships container and audit logs to Microsoft Sentinel or Splunk.