Cortex XSIAM tiers, ingestion economics, and what's bundled at each level.

Cortex XSIAM is sold in three tiers (NG-SIEM, Enterprise, Premium) with a shared ingestion baseline and add-on bundles. Knowing what's included at each tier lets you spot quotes that have you paying for things twice.

6 min read·Cortex XSIAM

Cortex XSIAM ships hundreds of detection rules already mapped to MITRE ATT&CK and tuned by Palo Alto Networks against telemetry from across their customer base. The work in week one is enabling the right ones, not authoring from scratch.

When a deployment SOW prices six weeks of rule tuning, half of that scope is reading the OOTB ruleset, deciding which to enable, and toggling them on. That work is genuinely valuable, but it is hours, not weeks. The other half, customizing rules to your environment specific noise, is real engineering and worth your partner full rate.

The trap is letting both halves get billed at the same engineering rate. Your team sees a six-week scope, assumes it is all custom work, and pays accordingly.

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Takeaways

→Three tiers: NG-SIEM (analytics + automation + UEBA), Enterprise (adds XDR agent + Host Insights), Premium (adds Cloud Posture + Cloud Runtime + WAAS).
→Analytics tier ingestion: 100 GB/day minimum, GB/day-based pricing, feeds real-time detection.
→Cortex Data Lake tier: 50 GB/day minimum (only on top of Analytics minimum), cost-efficient for retention and threat hunting, not for real-time detection.
→Cloud Posture Security and Cloud Runtime Security are bundled into Premium; do not pay for them again as add-ons on a Premium quote.
→Watch for under-sizing the Analytics tier to win the deal; the renewal-year price spike when you exceed the quoted volume is real.
→Bring a partner in for custom log volume estimation, multi-cloud agent allocation, or Analytics-vs-Data-Lake portfolio decisions.

Source: Cortex XSIAM product licenses (Palo Alto Networks docs)Last verified Apr 26, 2026

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“Can you split the rule scope into two phases? Phase one is enablement of the OOTB ruleset against my environment, ideally on a flat-rate or fixed-fee basis. Phase two is authoring custom rules where the OOTB set has gaps, billed hourly.”

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