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Investigate security initiative metrics

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Security initiative metrics in Microsoft Security Exposure Management measure security exposure for a specific scope of assets or resources within a security initiative. Most security initiatives (but not all) have metrics associated with them.

Prerequisites

  • Learn about security metrics.
  • Review permissions and prerequisites needed for working with Security Exposure Management.
  • Note possible preview issues:
    • Some instances of affected assets information (largely information originating in Secure score) don't appear on the Affected Assets tab in an individual metric.
    • Some critical asset information for assets in the Affected Assets tab doesn't show.
    • Asset details are calculated on demand.
    • Cloud-related metrics are only available if Microsoft Defender for Cloud is available in the subscription, and the Defender Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) plan is enabled.
    • In some cases, metrics are more specific than the scope of the related recommendations. In this case, the asset detail shown doesn't align with the asset details of the related recommendations.
    • If you remove a workload, you can't refresh the metric status and the asset details for the workload's related metrics.

Review security metrics

  1. In the Microsoft Defender portal, select Exposure management -> Exposure insights -> Metrics to open the Metrics page.

    Screenshot of the metrics page in Microsoft Security Exposure management.

  2. Select the metric you want to review.

  3. Review the metric properties.

    • Description: Metric description.
    • State: Current state of metric.
    • Last state update: The last time metric state was updated.
    • Current value: Current exposure score from significant to no/low exposure.
    • Affected assets. The number of affected assets out of the total assets.
    • Weight: Metric weight which affects the metric impact on initiative score.
    • Score impact: Possible score gain.
    • Security recommendations: Recommendations associated with the metric.

Edit the metric weight

You can customize metric weight according to your business needs.

  1. To edit the metric weight, select a specific metric.
  2. In the metric properties side panel, select Edit metric, then change the metric weight and apply.
  3. To accept the risk described by the metric, set the metric weight to Risk accepted.

Next steps