SC-100 Practice Question: Design security operations, identity, and compliance capabilities
A financial services company uses Microsoft Sentinel as its SIEM. The security operations team wants to reduce the number of low-fidelity alerts that reach analysts by correlating related alerts into incidents and automatically closing incidents that match known benign patterns. The team also wants to preserve an audit trail of every automated closure. Which Microsoft Sentinel capability should you design into the solution?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse analytics rules, which create and group incidents, with automation rules, which act on incidents after they are created.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Automation rules that run a playbook to close incidents matching a benign pattern
The requirement combines automated triage with an auditable record of the action. Automation rules are the Microsoft Sentinel feature that evaluates incident properties and can run a playbook or change status, and a playbook that closes the incident with a comment creates the audit trail. Analytics rules, workbooks, and connectors each address detection, visualization, or ingestion rather than automated incident closure.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Automation rules that run a playbook to close incidents matching a benign pattern
Why this is correct
Automation rules in Microsoft Sentinel can trigger on incident creation, evaluate conditions such as analytics rule name or entity, and run a playbook or change incident status. Running a playbook that closes the incident and leaves a comment records the automated action in the incident timeline, giving the required audit trail while removing low-fidelity noise before analysts see it.
- ✗
Workbooks that visualize incident trends across the last 30 days
Why it's wrong here
Workbooks are dashboards that render queries and visualizations for reporting and hunting. They are read-only views and cannot change incident status, trigger playbooks, or close anything. While a workbook could show how many incidents were closed, it would not perform the automated closure or record the reason, so it fails the scenario.
- ✗
Data connectors that ingest Microsoft Defender XDR incidents into Microsoft Sentinel
Why it's wrong here
Connectors bring alerts and incidents from sources such as Microsoft Defender XDR into Microsoft Sentinel for correlation and investigation. They do not evaluate benign patterns, do not close incidents, and do not generate an audit record of an automated decision. Ingesting more data without a response mechanism would likely increase, not reduce, analyst workload.
- ✗
Analytics rules configured with entity mapping to group alerts by IP address
Why it's wrong here
Entity mapping enriches alerts with entities so incidents can be grouped and investigated, but it does not close incidents or run automated responses. It also does not create an audit record of an automated decision. Grouping alone would still surface the low-fidelity incidents to analysts, so it does not meet the noise-reduction or audit-trail requirement.
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JA
Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official Microsoft exam blueprint
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