If your threat detection strategy is "wait for the SOC vendor to email us," you don't have one. You have a hope. I've watched a mid-size SaaS company pay six figures a year for a commercial SIEM and still miss a compromised WordPress plugin for eleven days — because the detection rules that would have caught it were behind a premium content pack nobody bought. Meanwhile, a two-node Wazuh cluster on hardware they already owned flagged the same class of behavior in under four minutes. That's the entire pitch: detection coverage is a function of rules and telemetry, not licensing.

This guide is for engineers who already know what a SIEM is and are tired of the "just use the Docker compose, it's easy" blog posts that fall apart the moment you point 200 production agents at them.…