Patriot Consulting Launches Free Sentinel Cost Calculator to Help Organizations Forecast and Reduce SIEM Spend
Microsoft Sentinel pricing is driven by data ingestion volume and retention duration, and many organizations are caught off guard by the bill when high-volume data sources — Defender XDR, firewalls, Entra ID logs, Office 365 audit logs, and on-premises infrastructure — are onboarded without planning. The Sentinel Cost Calculator turns the back-of-the-napkin math into a clear, shareable estimate, allowing teams to model commitment tiers, basic vs. analytics logs, auxiliary tables, long-term archive, and the savings available through Microsoft's Defender + Sentinel unified pricing.
The calculator was authored by Lamar Arnau, a Senior Azure Security Architect at Patriot Consulting, who built the underlying cost model from his day-to-day experience scoping Microsoft Sentinel and Defender for Cloud deployments for Patriot's customers.
"Sentinel is one of the most powerful SIEM platforms on the market, but customers consistently ask us the same question before they sign: what is this going to cost me?" said Joe Stocker, CEO of Patriot Consulting and a Microsoft MVP in Security. "Lamar built the Sentinel Cost Calculator to give a straight answer in under five minutes, without a sales call. It's the same model he uses internally when he scopes Sentinel deployments for our customers, and we're making it available to the entire community for free."
The calculator is designed for security architects, IT directors, and CISOs evaluating Sentinel against third-party SIEMs such as Splunk, QRadar, and Elastic. In addition to estimating raw ingestion costs, the tool surfaces opportunities to reduce spend by routing verbose log sources to basic or auxiliary tables, applying ingestion-time transformations, and taking advantage of commitment-tier discounts. Patriot Consulting has used these techniques to help customers in the financial services, manufacturing, and healthcare industries cut Sentinel costs by up to 70% compared to their legacy SIEM platforms.
The Sentinel Cost Calculator is available now at sentinelestimator.com. No registration or login is required. Organizations interested in a deeper Sentinel cost optimization assessment or a full Sentinel deployment can contact Patriot Consulting through patriotconsulting.com.
About the Author — Lamar Arnau is a Senior Azure Security Architect at Patriot Consulting, where he specializes in Microsoft Sentinel, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Azure Arc, and Azure infrastructure security. He designs, deploys, and operates security solutions that help enterprise customers protect their cloud and hybrid estates, with a focus on building resilient, cost-efficient security programs. Lamar holds more than 20 Microsoft certifications, as well as the (ISC)² Certified Cloud Security Professional (CCSP) and Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) designations, and is a recognized contributor within Patriot's Azure Security practice.
Patriot Consulting Technology Group is one of the top Microsoft Security Partners in the United States. Each year we help an average of 4 million users deploy Microsoft Security technology. We focus 100% on securely deploying Microsoft Cloud technology with an emphasis on knowledge transfer—this empowers our clients to feel confident about both their security and investments in the Microsoft platform. Patriot's deep knowledge of Microsoft technology has earned us multiple Gold Competencies, and we were the only Microsoft Partner invited to participate in AccountGuard, which helped secure the US 2020 and 2024 elections.