For more than a decade, System Monitor — better known as Sysmon — has been the indispensable Swiss Army knife of enterprise security teams, threat hunters, and incident responders. The free Sysinternals utility, originally created by Mark Russinovich and now maintained by Microsoft, has filled a gaping hole in Windows’ native event logging by capturing granular details about process creation, network connections, file changes, and registry modifications. Now, Microsoft is signaling that the era of bolting on Sysmon as a third-party add-on may be drawing to a close. The company is building equivalent telemetry capabilities directly into Windows 11, a move that could fundamentally reshape how organizations monitor endpoints and detect threats.

The development, first reported by TechRepublic, confirms that Microsoft is integrating native support for Sysmon-class event logging into the Windows 11 operating system itself. Rather than requiring administrators to download, deploy, configure, and maintain a separate Sysmon binary across potentially thousands of endpoints, the core telemetry that security professionals depend on would ship as a built-in feature of the OS. This is not merely a quality-of-life improvement — it represents a philosophical shift in how Microsoft views the role of security observability within Windows.

Why Sysmon Became the De Facto Standard for Endpoint Visibility

To understand the significance of this move, it helps to appreciate just how critical Sysmon has become to modern security operations. When a security analyst investigates a breach, they need to answer fundamental questions: What processes executed on this machine? What network connections were established? Were any files created, modified, or deleted in suspicious directories? Did an attacker tamper with the Windows Registry to establish persistence? Out of the box, Windows Event Logging provides only a fraction of this information. Sysmon was purpose-built to fill those gaps, logging detailed events such as process creation with full command-line arguments, DNS query logging, driver and image load tracking, and even clipboard activity monitoring.

Over time, Sysmon became deeply embedded in the workflows of security operations centers (SOCs) worldwide. It is a core data source for SIEM platforms, a foundational component of detection rules in frameworks like Sigma, and a primary telemetry feed for threat hunting operations. Community-maintained configuration files — such as the widely adopted SwiftOnSecurity Sysmon configuration — have become standard deployments in enterprises of all sizes. The MITRE ATT&CK framework references Sysmon events extensively in its detection guidance. In short, Sysmon is not just a tool; it is infrastructure.

The Operational Burden of Managing Sysmon at Scale

Despite its ubiquity, Sysmon has always carried operational overhead that frustrated IT and security teams. Deploying Sysmon across a large enterprise requires software distribution tooling, configuration management, and ongoing maintenance. Each Sysmon update — and there have been many, with significant feature additions over the years — must be tested and rolled out across the fleet. Configuration changes, such as adding new event types or tuning filters to reduce noise, require redeploying or updating the Sysmon configuration XML file on every endpoint. In environments with tens of thousands of machines, this is a nontrivial undertaking.

There are also architectural considerations. Sysmon operates as a device driver and a Windows service, which means it runs with high privileges and can, in rare cases, introduce stability or performance issues. Because it is a user-mode service backed by a kernel driver, it occupies a somewhat unusual position in the Windows software stack. Attackers, too, have taken notice of Sysmon’s prevalence: sophisticated threat actors have developed techniques to blind, unload, or tamper with Sysmon to evade detection. When Sysmon is a separate, identifiable binary and service, it presents a known target for adversaries seeking to cover their tracks.

Native Integration Changes the Calculus for Defenders and Attackers Alike

By folding Sysmon-equivalent telemetry into Windows 11 natively, Microsoft addresses many of these pain points simultaneously. Native integration means the telemetry engine ships with the OS and is updated through standard Windows Update channels, eliminating the need for separate deployment and update pipelines. Configuration could potentially be managed through Group Policy, Microsoft Intune, or other endpoint management tools that administrators already use, reducing the operational friction of maintaining consistent logging policies across the enterprise.

Perhaps more importantly, native integration makes the telemetry harder for attackers to disable. When security logging is woven into the fabric of the operating system — as opposed to running as a distinct, removable service — it becomes significantly more difficult for an adversary to selectively neutralize it without triggering other alerts or compromising system stability. This is the same principle that has driven Microsoft to embed other security features, such as Credential Guard and Virtualization-Based Security, deep into the OS kernel and hypervisor layers. The closer a defensive capability sits to the core of the operating system, the higher the cost for an attacker to subvert it.

Implications for the Security Tooling Ecosystem

The ripple effects of this decision will be felt across the security industry. Endpoint detection and response (EDR) vendors, many of whom supplement or rely on Sysmon telemetry as part of their detection pipelines, will need to evaluate how native Windows telemetry compares to their existing data collection mechanisms. For some vendors, native Sysmon-class logging could reduce the need for custom kernel drivers or user-mode agents, potentially simplifying their architectures. For others, it could mean competing with a capability that Microsoft now provides for free, out of the box.

SIEM vendors and managed detection and response (MDR) providers stand to benefit significantly. A consistent, reliable stream of high-fidelity endpoint telemetry from every Windows 11 machine — without requiring customers to first deploy and configure Sysmon — lowers the barrier to effective security monitoring. Organizations that previously lacked the resources or expertise to deploy Sysmon will now have access to the same caliber of event data that well-resourced enterprises have relied on for years. This democratization of security telemetry could meaningfully improve the baseline security posture of small and mid-sized businesses, which are disproportionately targeted by ransomware and commodity malware campaigns.

Questions That Remain Unanswered

Despite the enthusiasm surrounding this development, several important questions remain. First, it is unclear whether the native implementation will achieve full feature parity with the current Sysmon utility. Sysmon has accumulated a rich set of event types over many iterations — 29 distinct event IDs as of recent versions — covering everything from process creation (Event ID 1) to process tampering (Event ID 25) and file block operations. Whether Microsoft intends to replicate the entire event catalog or offer a curated subset will matter enormously to detection engineers who have built extensive rule sets around specific Sysmon event types.

Second, the question of configurability looms large. One of Sysmon’s greatest strengths is its highly flexible XML-based configuration system, which allows security teams to precisely control which events are logged, apply include and exclude filters, and tune the volume of telemetry to match their environment’s needs and their SIEM’s ingestion capacity. If the native implementation offers less granular configuration options, organizations may still need to run Sysmon alongside the built-in telemetry — defeating much of the purpose of native integration. As reported by TechRepublic, details on the exact configuration mechanisms have not yet been fully disclosed by Microsoft.

The Broader Microsoft Security Strategy at Play

This move should be viewed in the context of Microsoft’s broader strategy to position Windows as a security platform rather than merely an operating system that requires third-party security tools to be adequately defended. Over the past several years, Microsoft has aggressively expanded the security capabilities built into Windows and its cloud services. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, formerly Windows Defender ATP, has evolved from a basic antivirus engine into a full-featured EDR platform. Features like Attack Surface Reduction rules, Tamper Protection, and Smart App Control reflect a sustained investment in making Windows inherently more resistant to attack.

Integrating Sysmon-level telemetry natively is a logical extension of this strategy. It also aligns with Microsoft’s commercial interests: the richer the telemetry that Windows generates natively, the more valuable Microsoft’s own security analytics platforms — including Microsoft Sentinel, Defender for Endpoint, and the broader Microsoft 365 Defender suite — become. Organizations that adopt native Windows telemetry will find the path of least resistance leads directly to Microsoft’s security ecosystem, where that telemetry can be ingested, correlated, and acted upon with minimal friction.

What Security Teams Should Do Now

For enterprise security teams, the practical advice is straightforward: monitor this development closely but do not rip out Sysmon deployments prematurely. Until Microsoft provides detailed documentation on the scope, configurability, and event fidelity of the native telemetry, Sysmon remains the proven and battle-tested solution. Security architects should begin evaluating their current Sysmon configurations to identify which event types and filters are most critical to their detection engineering programs, so they can quickly assess whether the native implementation meets their requirements once full details are available.

Detection engineers should also begin thinking about the transition path for their rule sets. If native telemetry uses different event IDs, field names, or data formats than Sysmon, existing Sigma rules, SIEM correlation searches, and automated playbooks will need to be updated. The community-driven nature of Sysmon configuration and detection content means that the broader security community will likely rally to produce mapping guides and updated detection rules — but organizations should not assume this will happen overnight. Planning for this transition now, while the details are still emerging, will position security teams to move quickly when the native capability reaches general availability.

What is clear is that Microsoft’s decision to embed Sysmon-class telemetry into Windows 11 is one of the most consequential developments in endpoint security monitoring in recent years. It validates the work that Mark Russinovich and the Sysinternals team have done over more than a decade, and it acknowledges a simple truth that the security community has long understood: the telemetry that Sysmon provides is not optional — it is essential. Making it native is long overdue.