There’s a moment in every serious incident call where someone asks a very normal question.
“What changed on the network?”
Not in theory. Not at a slide level. On the wire.
And that’s where things usually slow down.
Because your SIEM has events. Your EDR has endpoint detail. Your firewall has logs. But the actual network behavior, who talked to whom, over what port, through which tunnel, with what loss, is scattered.
So the room fills with workarounds.
Someone exports.
Someone writes a custom query.
Someone says, “give me five minutes.”
It becomes forty then a day.
The “simple” questions
Try these in the middle of an incident:
“Show me the top 8 destination ports by packets.”
“Generate the busiest ports, but exclude 80 and 443.”
“What’s the busiest destination port per hour for HTTP traffic?”
“Which initiator MACs are hitting ports 1000–2000?”
“Compare retransmission rates across tunnel types.”
None of these are exotic. They’re the basics. But answering them cleanly usually means stitching together partial views.
You might get port counts from one place, but not the MAC attribution. You might see TCP sessions, but lose L2 context. You might see the inner traffic, but not know it’s riding over GRE or MPLS.
And tunnel visibility? That’s where the arguments start.
Where most stacks break
Flow logs are great until they aren’t. They summarize, they compress, and they drop the nuance you need when something looks off.
Packet capture is precise, but not practical at scale unless it’s structured and queryable. Nobody wants to manually open Wireshark at 02:00 to answer a question about port distribution over time.
Loss and retransmission metrics are another classic. The app team blames the network. The network blames the firewall. The firewall blames “upstream”. Meanwhile, nobody has a clear breakdown of retransmission rates by tunnel encapsulation.
You can get the data. It just takes too long.
What changes with MAIA
MAIA sits on top of normalized L2–L7 telemetry and lets analysts ask those same questions directly.
Not by building a custom dashboard. Not by exporting logs.
If you want the busiest dynamic ports right now, you get them. If you want to exclude system and registered ports, done. If you want to see initiator IPs contacting 10.0.0.0/8 but not on 80 or 443, that’s a query, not a weekend project.
Tunnel-aware questions stop being guesswork. You can pull all GRE tunnels, list machines on a specific VLAN, or compare retransmissions across VXLAN versus MPLS. You stop arguing about whether the underlay or overlay is the problem because you can actually see both.
And when someone asks, “who started it?”, you’re not reverse-engineering NAT and DHCP from three different tools. You can retrieve initiator MACs and IPs tied to specific port ranges and volume. Quickly.
This is about speed, not cleverness
Most breaches aren’t missed because the SOC didn’t have data. They’re missed because the team couldn’t turn the right question into a reliable answer fast enough.
The difference between 10 minutes and 3 hours matters. It changes containment scope. It changes whether you isolate one host or 200. It changes how much damage accumulates while you’re “still investigating”.
MAIA doesn’t replace your SIEM. It feeds it. The answers go back into the case: structured, contextual, tied to the actual traffic.
Your SIEM remains the cockpit. MAIA is what actually interrogates the wire.
Do one practical test
Pick five of the questions above. Run them during your next incident or tabletop.
Measure how long it takes to get defensible answers.
If the answer is “it depends” or “we need to pull data first”, you’ve found the bottleneck.
Call your SIEM team. Ask for integration that gives you queryable L2–L7 ground truth, including tunnels and retransmission analysis, and returns structured results into your existing workflow.
Because the hard part isn’t collecting events.
It’s answering the right question before the incident answers itself.
