I’ve worked with dozens of companies – from tiny startups to global giants – and here’s the bitter truth that still surprises people: every single one had major gaps in logging and monitoring.

And those gaps don’t show up during audits or slide decks. They show up during incidents, when everyone is asking the same question: “What happened?” – and the logs don’t have an answer.

Why “We Have Visibility” Is Often a Dangerous Assumption

When Logs Lie:

Security teams love logs for a simple reason: they feel like evidence. A record. A replay button for reality.

But in real incidents, logs often behave less like a truth serum and more like a spotlight pointed in the wrong direction. The uncomfortable reality is this: many organizations don’t lack security tools – they lack provable visibility. They assume they’re seeing what matters because a policy says they should.

Here’s why that assumption breaks the moment an attacker shows up.

Logs Only Capture What’s Configured, Not What Happened

Logging isn’t a universal constant. It’s a set of switches someone turned on (or didn’t), retention settings someone shortened, and pipelines someone forgot to validate.

That’s how entire attack paths go missing:
– A critical audit category was never enabled.
– An agent wasn’t deployed to a segment “temporarily.”
– Logs were collected, but not forwarded.
– Retention was tuned for cost, not investigation.

Teams often believe they have visibility based on policy documents and architecture diagrams – not proof. And when an incident occurs, they discover the most painful rule in detection engineering:

If it wasn’t logged, it didn’t exist – until it did.

Reality check: “We log X” means nothing until you can prove it with a test, a query, and a timestamp.

Lateral Movement Leaves Few Log Trails

Most breaches aren’t loud. The initial compromise might generate signals, but the real damage often happens after the attacker is already inside – when they move laterally through the environment.

And lateral movement is where logging tends to fall apart.

Attackers don’t need exotic malware. They use normal admin protocols and built-in Windows tooling:
– SSH
– SMB
– RDP

These often generate minimal centralized logs, or produce telemetry that never makes it to your SIEM in a useful form. Movement inside “trusted” zones is treated like internal traffic: routine, low-risk, uninteresting.

That trust is exactly what attackers exploit.

The blind spot: many environments focus on perimeter visibility while the attacker is calmly walking through internal hallways.

Alert Fatigue Bury Critical Events in Noise

Even when logs are captured, they still have to become action.

This is where modern SOCs face a different failure mode: not absence, but overload.
– Too many rules firing on low-value events
– Too many “high severity” alerts with unclear priority
– Too many detections that lack context, confidence, or ownership

So the team gets numb. High-severity alerts sit untriaged for hours or days not because no one cares, but because everything looks urgent all the time.

Threats aren’t missed because they didn’t exist.

They’re missed because they were buried.

Alert fatigue isn’t a people problem. It’s a signal design problem.

The painful truth:

Compromised Logging Systems Are the First Target

Attackers don’t just avoid logs. They attack logging.

Because logs are the thing that can convict them.

Common moves are depressingly simple:
– CloudTrail turned off
– Audit logs wiped
– SIEM forwarding disconnected
– Logging services disabled or altered

And many organizations only notice after the incident, when the investigation hits a gap and someone says, “That’s weird… we should have logs here.”

Log integrity is often assumed, not verified.

Hard lesson: if your logging can be disabled quietly, it will be – early.

Many Tools Lack Contextual Correlation

A single event rarely looks like a breach.

A suspicious login could be a developer traveling. A strange process could be a script. A new admin could be a legitimate change.

But a pattern across identity, endpoint, network, and application logs? That’s when the story becomes obvious.

The problem is that many environments still treat telemetry in isolation. Tools detect single points, but don’t stitch them into narratives.

Without correlation:
– weak signals don’t connect
– sequences don’t emerge
– attackers win by staying “just below the threshold”

It’s not that the evidence isn’t there. It’s that it’s fragmented.

Detection maturity jump: stop asking “what happened in this tool?” and start asking “what happened across the environment?”

Shadow IT and Unauthorized Tools Generate No Logs

Finally, there’s the visibility killer no SIEM can fix: stuff you don’t know exists.

Unsanctioned apps. Rogue servers. Shadow infrastructure. Unapproved SaaS tools. Developer test environments that became “production-ish.”

If it never connects to centralized logging, it creates a blind spot by default.

And blind spots compound quickly in organizations with weak asset control, unclear ownership, or rapid growth.

What you can’t log, you can’t secure.

The Real Problem: Visibility Based on Assumptions

Put these together and you get a pattern:
– Logs aren’t guaranteed
– Movement is quiet
– Alerts are noisy
– Logging itself is fragile
– Context is missing
– Entire systems live outside the telemetry boundary

So “we have visibility” becomes a comforting myth – until the day it matters.

What to Do Instead

You don’t fix this by buying one more tool. You fix it by changing how you validate visibility:
– Prove logging works with regular testing (not documentation)
– Treat internal movement as high-risk, not “trusted”
– Reduce noise so the SOC can breathe and prioritize
– Monitor logging health and integrity like production infrastructure
– Invest in correlation across identity, network, and apps
– Get asset control under discipline so shadow systems don’t grow unchecked

Visibility is not a checkbox.
It’s a system you have to continuously verify – because attackers will.

If this hit close to home, think twice – because:

Assumptions don’t survive incidents

Just because:

This is why I strongly recommend companies invest more in detection engineering, and why security specialists should invest more in correlation – because visibility doesn’t happen by accident.