Bottom line: Sysmon is a Windows service and driver that records detailed activity to the Windows event log according to an administrator-supplied configuration. Microsoft states that Sysmon does not analyze the events it creates. The configuration therefore acts like detection code: it decides what evidence exists, what is excluded, and how much data endpoints generate.
\nMicrosoft’s Sysmon documentation describes persistent monitoring across reboots and event types for activities such as process creation, network connections, file creation-time changes, driver or image loading, registry changes, DNS queries, process access, file deletion, clipboard changes, and other version-dependent categories.
\nThe page documents installation, configuration updates, uninstallation, schema inspection, filtering syntax, event fields, and the Microsoft-Windows-Sysmon/Operational log. Sysmon configurations use include and exclude rules, and Microsoft warns that excluded activity is not available later merely because an investigator wants it. The tool records evidence but does not alert on or interpret that evidence; collection and analysis must be designed separately.
\nInstalling Sysmon does not create a complete endpoint detection program, guarantee that an attacker cannot evade telemetry, or prove that a community configuration fits the environment. Event fields can contain usernames, command lines, paths, hashes, network destinations, and other sensitive information. High-volume rules can consume endpoint, collector, network, storage, and analyst capacity. An event is an observation, not proof of malicious intent.
\nThe following steps are DSE recommendations based on the cited source.
\n