Quick refresher: What are cloud SOC tools?
Cloud security operations center (SOC) tools support security teams in monitoring, investigating, and responding to threats and misconfigurations across cloud environments. These tools help SOC teams collect signals from cloud services, workloads, identities, and logs, then analyze and prioritize findings so they can take appropriate action.
As cloud adoption has grown, so has the complexity of securing cloud environments. Distributed architectures, frequent configuration changes, and shared responsibility models introduce challenges that differ from traditional on-premises environments. Misconfigurations, overly permissive access, and exposed services can emerge quickly, often without clear visibility across teams.
SOC teams act as a centralized function for addressing these challenges. They monitor cloud environments for suspicious activity, investigate potential security incidents, and support remediation efforts. In many organizations, SOC teams are also responsible for tracking security posture and supporting compliance requirements related to identity, data access, and infrastructure configuration.
However, building and operating a SOC can require significant investment in tooling and expertise. Open-source SOC tools offer an alternative or complementary approach. They provide transparency, flexibility, and cost efficiency, and can be customized to fit specific workflows or environments. Open-source tools may not cover every use case out of the box, many organizations use them alongside commercial or cloud-native security platforms to extend coverage and integrate additional context.
Before exploring some of the most commonly used open-source SOC tools, it’s helpful to understand the core challenges these tools are designed to address in cloud security operations.
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Understanding SOC requirements in cloud environments
The unique challenges of cloud SOCs
Scalability: Cloud environments scale up and down at short notice, requiring SOC tools to adapt in real time. But the scalability challenge is more than just having multiple resources to monitor—without the right tools, it also means more blind spots for attackers to exploit.
Ephemeral resources: Designed for static workloads, traditional SOC setups can’t help security teams answer questions like which ephemeral workloads (e.g., containers and serverless functions) are currently running and whether they’re properly configured.
Decentralized data: Logs and events in the cloud are scattered across multiple services and regions, making it harder to correlate and analyze threats. For example, SOC teams can find it difficult to trace the relationship between a suspicious activity in a container that has since been shut down and a more recent lateral movement towards sensitive data.
Cloud-native attack vectors: Cloud-specific risks – think insecure APIs, misconfigured VMs and containers, and lateral movement within cloud workloads – require specialized tools for detection.
Critical SOC tool capabilities
What essential functions should OSS cloud SOC tools have to solve the problems described above?:
Continuous monitoring: SOCs tools should monitor cloud workloads non-stop, seamlessly adjusting to the cloud’s ephemeral and highly scalable nature. These tools should detect and correlate anomalies, monitor traffic flow, instantly alert teams to risky configurations, and improve overall security posture.
Log collection and analysis: An essential part of your SOC arsenal, cloud-native log collection and analysis tools can bring game-changing insights into anomaly detection and root cause analysis. They drill down into decentralized logs, helping security teams connect the dots across various cloud services and discover potential security incidents.
Threat detection: SOC threat detection tools should have up-to-date vulnerability databases and be connected to real-time threat intel feeds. With these in place, identifying indicators of compromise (IoCs) and emerging attack techniques can be a walk in the park.
Incident response: Cloud-focused incident response tools should come with prebuilt and custom incident response strategies. These tools function as first responders, swiftly halting suspicious activities, blocking malicious IPs, and isolating vulnerable resources.
Key open-source tools for cloud SOCs
To support day-to-day cloud security operations, SOC teams typically rely on a combination of tools spanning monitoring, detection, investigation, vulnerability assessments, and incident response. Open-source tools can play an important role here by providing transparency, flexibility, and extensibility across different stages of the SOC workflow.
Below, we’ve grouped commonly used open-source SOC tools by function. Some tools span multiple categories and are often deployed as part of a broader, integrated stack.
Monitoring and log collection tools
Monitoring and log collection tools help SOC teams aggregate telemetry from cloud services, workloads, and infrastructure. These tools are often used alongside – or as lightweight alternatives to – traditional SIEM platforms.
KubeArmor
KubeArmor focuses on Kubernetes runtime visibility and policy enforcement, helping teams observe and constrain container behavior at runtime.
Key capabilities:
eBPF- and Linux Security Module (LSM)–based monitoring of pod behavior and system activity
Kubernetes-native security policies for workload hardening and runtime controls
Event logging and visibility into process, file, and network activity within clusters
KubeArmor is commonly used in container-centric environments where teams want runtime observability and policy enforcement tightly integrated with Kubernetes.
Security Onion
Security Onion is an open-source SIEM and intrusion detection platform designed for network-focused monitoring and analysis.
Key capabilities:
Signature-based detection, packet capture, and network traffic analysis
Support for honeypots and intrusion detection workflows
Multi-tenant architecture to support collaboration across SOC and IT teams
Security Onion is often deployed in environments where network visibility and packet-level analysis are a priority, either as a standalone platform or alongside other tools.
Graylog Open
Graylog Open is the self-managed, open-source edition of the Graylog log management and analysis platform.
Key capabilities:
High-throughput log ingestion for large cloud and hybrid environments
Centralized aggregation of logs from servers, containers, serverless workloads, and network devices
Flexible querying and parsing using Lucene-based search
Graylog Open is frequently used as a foundational log aggregation layer within SOC architectures, with additional detection or enrichment layered on top.
Threat detection and threat intelligence solutions
Threat detection tools uncover and respond to threats; threat intelligence tools provide SOC analysts with attacker TTPs and common IoCs to facilitate threat hunting.
Wazuh
Wazuh combines log analysis, security monitoring, and vulnerability detection into a single open-source platform.
Key capabilities:
Log collection and analysis across endpoints, cloud workloads, APIs, and networks
Agent-based monitoring for endpoints and servers
Support for threat detection, compliance checks, and configuration assessment
Mapping of activity and findings to frameworks such as MITRE ATT&CK
Wazuh is often used as a general-purpose security monitoring platform within open-source SOC stacks.
Yeti
Yeti is a threat intelligence management tool designed to centralize and enrich threat data.
Key capabilities:
Storage and querying of IoCs, TTPs, and threat intelligence via REST APIs
Enrichment of threat data with contextual information such as IP reputation and domain data
Linking of indicators to tactics and risk classifications
Export of intelligence in formats suitable for SIEMs and detection platforms
Yeti is typically used to support threat hunting and intelligence-driven investigations.
Vulnerability scanning and asset management
This category of tools track and scan cloud assets to detect vulnerabilities and malware.
Aircrack-ng
Aircrack-ng is a suite of command-line tools focused on wireless network assessment.
Key capabilities:
Passive and active monitoring of 802.11 wireless traffic
Packet capture and analysis
Support for testing wireless network configurations and encryption
Aircrack-ng is primarily used for wireless security testing rather than general cloud vulnerability management.
Codename SCNR
Codename SCNR is an open-source dynamic application security testing (DAST) tool designed for web application assessment.
Key capabilities:
Automated scanning of web applications and APIs
Identification of common web vulnerabilities such as injection flaws and input validation issues
REST API and CLI support for integration into testing workflows
Codename SCNR is commonly used during application testing phases rather than continuous cloud runtime monitoring.
Incident response and forensics tools
Incident response and forensics tools provide data on security incidents to enable SOC teams to dig into compromised systems and find attack paths and root causes.
Velociraptor
Velociraptor is a digital forensics and incident response platform focused on endpoint investigation.
Key capabilities:
Remote collection of forensic data across multiple endpoints
Threat hunting using Velociraptor Query Language (VQL)
Support for incident containment and post-incident analysis
Velociraptor is often used by IR teams for targeted investigations and large-scale endpoint data collection.
osquery
osquery exposes operating system data as relational tables that can be queried using SQL.
Key capabilities:
Scheduled and on-demand queries across Windows, macOS, and Linux systems
Visibility into processes, users, files, configurations, and system state
Prebuilt query packs for security monitoring and compliance checks
osquery is commonly used as a lightweight endpoint telemetry source within broader SOC workflows.
GRR Rapid Response
GRR Rapid Response (GRR) is an open-source remote forensics and incident response framework.
Key capabilities:
Client-server architecture for large-scale endpoint investigation
Remote collection of artifacts and indicators of compromise
Support for repeatable response workflows
GRR is typically used by experienced IR teams for deep forensic investigations across distributed environments.
Quick summary
Open-source SOC tools play an important role in modern security operations. They give security teams transparency, flexibility, and control across core functions such as log collection, monitoring, threat detection, and incident response. Tools like Wazuh, Security Onion, Velociraptor, and osquery are widely used because they can be adapted to different environments, extended through integrations, and tuned to match how individual SOC teams operate.
At the same time, cloud-native environments introduce patterns – such as ephemeral workloads, complex identity relationships, and highly distributed architectures – that often benefit from additional context and correlation. In these environments, many teams look to enrich the signals generated by open-source tools with cloud-aware insights that span identities, configurations, exposure, and runtime behavior.
This is why a “better together” approach is increasingly common. Open-source SOC tools provide the building blocks: collection, detection, investigation, and response. Cloud-native security platforms can complement those tools by adding contextual enrichment, cross-layer correlation, and prioritization – helping teams interpret signals faster and decide where to focus.
By combining open-source SOC tooling with cloud-native detection and response capabilities, organizations can build security operations that are both adaptable and scalable. The result isn’t replacing open source – it’s extending it, preserving the flexibility SOC teams value while adding clarity and context as cloud environments grow more complex.
Introducing Wiz Defend
Wiz Defend is designed to work alongside open-source SOC tools, enriching the signals they generate with cloud-native context and real-time correlation. Rather than replacing existing workflows, Wiz Defend helps SOC teams interpret what they’re already seeing – faster, with more confidence, and across increasingly complex cloud environments.
Here’s how Wiz Defend complements open-source SOC tooling and strengthens day-to-day SOC operations:
Agentless cloud visibility
Wiz Defend provides broad, agentless visibility across cloud environments – from infrastructure and identities to workloads and runtime activity. This allows SOC teams to quickly understand cloud context around alerts generated by SIEMs, EDRs, and other OSS tools, without requiring additional agents or disrupting existing deployments.Context-aware investigation and remediation guidance
By correlating findings across configuration, identity, exposure, and runtime signals, Wiz Defend helps teams move from alert to understanding more quickly. Built-in remediation guidance supports faster resolution by mapping issues back to their source – whether that’s a misconfiguration, over-permissioned identity, or vulnerable workload – reducing manual investigation time.The Wiz Security Graph
At the core of Wiz Defend is the Wiz Security Graph, which connects assets, identities, permissions, vulnerabilities, and threat activity into a single contextual view. This enables SOC teams to visualize attack paths and blast radius, helping prioritize investigations and support faster, more informed incident response when combined with existing SOC telemetry.Risk-based prioritization with cloud context
Instead of treating all alerts equally, Wiz Defend helps prioritize based on real-world impact – factoring in exposure, asset criticality, identity privileges, and exploitability. This allows SOC analysts to focus on the issues most likely to matter, while still relying on their open-source tools for detection and telemetry.Compliance insight and policy alignment
Wiz Defend continuously evaluates cloud environments against common regulatory and security frameworks, providing SOC teams with visibility into compliance posture alongside security risk. This complements OSS tools by tying operational findings to policy and governance requirements without adding manual overhead.
Open-source SOC tools remain a powerful foundation for security operations. By integrating Wiz Defend into that toolkit, organizations can add cloud-native context, correlation, and prioritization – helping SOC teams work more efficiently as cloud environments scale.
If you’d like to see how Wiz Defend fits into existing SOC workflows, request a demo to explore how cloud context can enhance detection, investigation, and response across your environment.
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