From Setup to Signal: Building My First Wazuh SIEM with Sysmon and Atomic Red Team

Introduction Setting up a SIEM sounds simple until you have to prove that it is actually seeing what you think it is seeing. For this project, I added Wazuh and Sysmon monitoring to an Atomic Red Team workstation, then used safe attack simulations to trace activity from the Windows endpoint into the SIEM. Two of my experiments produced clear, matching evidence in Sysmon and Wazuh. A third showed something equally useful: Sysmon recorded the activity locally, but I could not find a matching Wazuh alert. That gap taught me that installing a logging tool is only the beginning. Detection coverage has to be tested, not assumed. My name is Christopher Bontempi, and I am transitioning into cybersecurity because I enjoy problem-solving, continuous learning, and figuring out how systems fit together. This is my first contribution to the cybersecurity community. I hope it helps another beginner see how a collection of logs can become a useful story about what happened on a system. Setup Adding ART Workstation to Wazuh I chose ART Workstation for this project because it already had Atomic Red Team installed. That gave me a safe Windows endpoint where I could generate controlled activity without changing the Active Directory server. From the Wazuh dashboard on Blue-Team Workstation, I generated a Windows agent deployment for the Wazuh manager at 10.170.0.99 . I named the agent ARTWorkstation and assigned it to the default and Windows_Servers groups. On ART Workstation, I ran Wazuh’s generated installer command from an elevated PowerShell window, then started the service: NET START WazuhSvc Wazuh showed ARTWorkstation as active with agent ID 008 and IP address 10.160.0.100 . At that point, I knew the endpoint could communicate with the SIEM, but I still needed useful Windows telemetry to validate the rest of the project. Installing Sysmon and forwarding its logs Next, I downloaded Sysmon and Neo23x0’s sysmonconfig-export.xml baseline configuration. I installed Sysmon64 from an e