Microtime’s DIY Journey Leads to Huntress Managed SIEM

Growing Pains: Why Microtime Needed a SIEM

As Microtime’s client base grew, so did the complexity of their security infrastructure. The small yet powerful team of four was soon bogged down by incomplete solutions from multiple vendors, including a well-known tool that couldn’t integrate with Microsoft Defender. The result was a flood of false positives, alert fatigue, and an overworked security team trying desperately to separate the noise from the real threats. It just wasn’t sustainable.

Marcel knew they needed something better—an affordable multi-tenant tool that could handle log ingestion and deliver actionable alerts. That’s when he pinpointed the missing piece in Microtime’s portfolio—security information and event management (SIEM).

Going it Alone: If No One’s Built the Perfect SIEM, Might As Well Do It Yourself

This missing piece isn’t just a nice-to-have. A SIEM is the backbone of any MSP’s security operations, essential for collecting log data, ensuring compliance, meeting cyber insurance requirements, detecting threats, and keeping tabs on everything happening in a network. Yet, for Marcel, a “perfect” SIEM was nowhere to be found. So, he rolled up his sleeves and did what he does best—build his own.

But as Marcel dove in, he had a stark realization. “I just knew that being the only person developing and maintaining the system would become unreasonable and cost a ton of time and energy,” he says. In other words, this wasn’t a project for the faint of heart.

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The Reality Check: Challenges in Building Your Own SIEM

Building a SIEM from scratch is no walk in the park, but this undertaking was about more than just Marcel’s can-do attitude. It was about the safety of his clients, so he proudly poured hundreds of hours into research, system development, coding, and quality assurance. He got so far as building out a dedicated system that contained the log storage mechanism, the log indexer, and the dashboard functionality, all built on the ELK (Elastic, Logstash, and Kibana) stack.

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Navigating Roadblocks: When DIY Hits a Wall, It’s Time to Pivot

Despite Marcel’s successful build, the time and energy he was investing made all his other responsibilities unmanageable. The DIY approach had reached its limits. It can’t be overstated that Marcel is no quitter, but after giving it all he had, he knew he had to explore options that could help him level up faster. He admits, “Implementing and maintaining a SIEM is nearly impossible and prohibitively expensive for an MSP, especially one managing a plethora of SMB environments.”

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After scouring the market for a game-changing solution, Marcel discovered Huntress had just released their Managed SIEM. “Huntress offered an incredibly reasonable price for the functionality, so it was a no-brainer,” Marcel explains. Having relied on Huntress products in the past, he was hopeful he may have finally found Microtime’s “perfect” fit.

“The value of the product is the biggest benefit. For a fraction of the cost of other security tools, it tends to perform far better than any other SIEM in my experience.” - Marcel Pawlowski, Security Engineer, Microtime

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Taste of Triumph: Managed SIEM Stops a Threat in Its Tracks

Within weeks of deploying Managed SIEM, Microtime caught an adversary red-handed, easily tracing login attempts, tracking initial access, and locating attack vectors. They booted the attacker out of the environment and secured the system before the threat actors could do any damage.

From that experience alone, the impacted client elected to keep Microtime’s latest security tool in place. Because Microtime was now the only MSP in the area with SIEM capabilities, the client’s internal IT department also felt that their environment had become far more secure.

And that was just the start. Managed SIEM easily cut through all the clutter, pinpointing real threats without drowning Marcel and his team in false alarms.

“The biggest benefit to our day-to-day security is that we don’t have to divert any of our duties to managing it,” says Marcel. “And we don’t need to invest in more threat analysts because we have a second set of eyes on everything. With Huntress, I sleep easier at night.”

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Beyond Security: Finding a Community That Drives Positive Change Together

For Marcel, Huntress is about more than the tools. It’s also about the tribe. He values the Huntress community, where he can consistently find friendly, reliable support 24/7. “Huntress isn’t like most security companies who believe they have some pedigree to maintain,” he says. “They’re genuine people here to help and push the industry forward.”

Marcel and his team at Microtime have found a true partner in Huntress. In fact, he declares Huntress is now “the cornerstone of our security stack.” With Managed SIEM, Microtime can consolidate their security operations, reduce operational strain, and scale effectively, all while maintaining profitability. Simply put, Managed SIEM provides actionable intelligence without overwhelming smaller security teams, making it an ideal fit for a growing MSP like Microtime.

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Building Better Security