Microsoft SC-200 - Microsoft Security Operations Analyst

To minimize administrative effort in responding to incidents and remediating security threats in Microsoft Sentinel, you should use the platform’s built-in automation and orchestration capabilities — specifically Automation Rules and Playbooks.

Microsoft Sentinel Automation Rules (Option C):

Automation rules in Sentinel allow you to automate incident management tasks such as assigning owners, changing severity, tagging, or automatically running playbooks when an incident or alert is created.

They help standardize responses across similar alerts, significantly reducing manual intervention.

Microsoft documentation states:

“Automation rules simplify the management of playbook triggers and incident handling by allowing you to define actions that automatically occur when incidents are created or updated.”

Microsoft Sentinel Playbooks (Option D):

Playbooks are Logic App–based workflows that automate responses to security alerts or incidents.

They can perform remediation actions such as disabling compromised accounts, isolating infected devices, blocking IP addresses, or sending notifications to SOC teams.

You can link playbooks directly to analytics rules or call them through automation rules for end-to-end automation.

Incorrect Options:

A. Bookmarks are used for hunting investigations, not for automation or remediation.

B. Azure Automation runbooks can be used for specific administrative scripts but require more manual setup and integration — not the most efficient choice for Sentinel’s automated workflows.

E. Azure Functions apps are custom code execution environments; while powerful, they are not the primary tool for Sentinel’s automated response.

Box 1: Owner

Only the Owner can assign initiatives.

Box 2: Contributor

Only the Contributor or the Owner can apply security recommendations.

In Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (part of Microsoft Defender XDR), device groups are used to organize endpoints for policy, automation, and investigation purposes. Tags provide a dynamic way to categorize devices temporarily or permanently.

To temporarily group high-value machines for investigation or response, the correct approach is to use tags and a new high-rank device group:

Add a tag to the machines (C): Applying a tag allows quick identification and dynamic inclusion in a new group without permanently altering membership.

Create a new device group (D): Creating a device group with a rank of 1 ensures it has the highest precedence and that devices tagged for this group are included immediately.

Add a tag to the device group (A): The device group’s membership rule can include the tag value, automating group inclusion.

This approach aligns with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint guidance to “use device tags and group ranks for dynamic grouping and prioritized policy application” — minimizing administrative effort while allowing targeted response actions.

For SQL Server on Azure VMs (VM1), Defender for Cloud’s Advanced Threat Protection and Vulnerability Assessment for SQL “on machines” are enabled by registering the instance as a SQL virtual machine using the SQL IaaS Agent extension. This single Azure VM extension onboards the SQL workload, exposes SQL VM resource management, and lights up Defender for SQL (ATP + VA) with minimal admin effort—no separate agents are required on Azure VMs beyond this extension for these features.

For on-premises/Arc servers (Server1), the machine is already Arc-enabled. To protect SQL instances with Defender for Cloud and to surface vulnerability assessment and threat protection signals, you deploy the Azure Arc SQL Server extension (delivered as an Arc “virtual machine extension”) to register the instance with Azure. In addition, Arc scenarios use the Azure Monitor Agent (AMA) for data collection and security signal ingestion in Defender for Cloud (the legacy Log Analytics agent is not recommended). This combination satisfies ATP/VA requirements while keeping operations simple and consistent with current agent guidance.

Therefore:

VM1: only the Azure VM extension (SQL IaaS Agent extension).

Server1: AMA + an Azure (Arc) extension (Arc SQL Server extension).

The query filters on ingestion_time() > ago(1d), which means it is interested in recently ingested device telemetry (DeviceEvents and DeviceProcessEvents) within the last 24 hours. To minimize the time between an event ingest and a detection/notification, you want the rule engine to evaluate the query as close to real-time as possible. Microsoft’s XDR/Defender detection framework supports continuous (near-real-time, NRT) detection mode, which evaluates incoming telemetry continuously (or at very short intervals) rather than waiting for a scheduled run.

Scheduled analytics/detection rules run on fixed intervals (for example every hour, every 3 hours, etc.), which introduces a guaranteed latency equal to the schedule period. By contrast, a Continuous (NRT) rule processes telemetry as it arrives (or in very short batch windows), dramatically reducing the time-to-alert for matching events. That makes Continuous (NRT) the correct choice when the requirement is to minimize notification latency for device events.

Note the operational trade-offs: continuous rules can generate more frequent evaluations and higher operational overhead (and potentially more noise), so they should be scoped and tuned appropriately (filters, distinct counts, thresholds) to avoid excessive alerts.

Microsoft 365 Copilot for Security uses Security Compute Units (SCUs) to determine available processing capacity for AI-driven operations. Each SCU represents a fixed amount of compute resources for handling Copilot for Security prompts and plugin interactions (like Sentinel).

When a notification appears stating that “SCU usage is nearing the provisioned capacity limit,” it means that the organization’s current SCU allocation is insufficient for ongoing demand. To restore full response functionality, the tenant admin (or authorized role) must increase the number of provisioned SCUs.

Microsoft documentation states:

“If Copilot for Security indicates that requests cannot be processed due to SCU capacity, increase your provisioned SCUs in the Microsoft 365 admin center or Azure portal to meet demand.”

The other options do not resolve the issue:

Opening a second session does not add capacity.

Waiting does not guarantee SCU availability.

The Optimization Workbook relates to Sentinel performance, not Copilot SCU allocation.

✅ Answer: D. Update the provisioned SCUs

msticpy is a library for InfoSec investigation and hunting in Jupyter Notebooks. It includes functionality to: query log data from multiple sources. enrich the data with Threat Intelligence, geolocations and Azure resource data. extract Indicators of Activity (IoA) from logs and unpack encoded data.

MSTICPy reduces the amount of code that customers need to write for Microsoft Sentinel, and provides:

Data query capabilities, against Microsoft Sentinel tables, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, Splunk, and other data sources.

Threat intelligence lookups with TI providers, such as VirusTotal and AlienVault OTX.

Enrichment functions like geolocation of IP addresses, Indicator of Compromise (IoC) extraction, and WhoIs lookups.

Visualization tools using event timelines, process trees, and geo mapping.

Advanced analyses, such as time series decomposition, anomaly detection, and clustering.

Enable and disable advanced features of Microsoft Defender for Cloud: Subscription Owner

Apply security recommendations to a resource: Security Admin

The Microsoft Sentinel Responder role allows users to investigate, triage, and resolve security incidents, which includes the ability to assign incidents to other users. This role is designed to provide the necessary permissions for incident management and response while still adhering to the principle of least privilege. Other roles such as Logic App Contributor and Microsoft Sentinel Contributor would have more permissions than necessary and may not be suitable for the analyst's needs. Microsoft Sentinel Reader role is not sufficient as it doesn't have permission to assign and resolve incidents.