Manage Alert Suppression Rules
Implementation Effort: Medium
Customer IT and Security Operations teams must define, configure, and maintain suppression rules to reduce alert fatigue while preserving visibility into critical threats.
User Impact: Low
All actions are performed by administrators; no user-facing changes or notifications are required.
Overview
Managing alert suppression rules in Microsoft Defender for Databases helps reduce noise from known or benign alerts, allowing security teams to focus on high-priority threats. Suppression rules can be applied to alerts that are triggered repeatedly by trusted tools, processes, or configurations that are not considered risky in the organization’s context.
Key Capabilities
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Create Suppression Rules
- Suppression rules can be created for alerts that have already been triggered.
- Use the Defender for Cloud REST API to retrieve the alert and define a suppression rule based on its properties 1.
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Manage Rules via API
- You can view, edit, or delete suppression rules using the Defender for Cloud API.
- This allows for automation and integration with CI/CD pipelines or custom security tooling 1.
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Rule Scope and Conditions
- Rules can be scoped to specific alert types, resource groups, or environments.
- Conditions may include alert severity, affected resource type, or specific metadata fields 1.
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Review and Audit
- Regularly review suppression rules to ensure they are still valid.
- Avoid suppressing alerts that could indicate evolving threats or misconfigurations.
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Best Practices
- Use suppression sparingly and only for well-understood, low-risk alerts.
- Document the rationale for each rule and periodically reassess its necessity.
This capability supports the Zero Trust principle of "Assume Breach" by ensuring that alert suppression is intentional, controlled, and does not hide critical threats. Without proper management, suppression rules can create blind spots in your security monitoring.