Cyber Sentinel
Four open-source tools, made to behave like one system.
Built to make security monitoring practical for small networks: open-source tools on a single Raspberry Pi 5, set up by an installation wizard, with alerts sent by email.
Problem
Security monitoring is often treated like an enterprise-only luxury.
Small teams and labs still need visibility: endpoint events, network alerts, searchable logs, and enough automation that setup does not become the actual project. Cyber Sentinel focused on making that stack understandable, deployable, and demonstrable.
My role
Architecture, integration, automation, and documentation.
I worked across tool selection, deployment flow, alerting behavior, the Kibana dashboards, and the documentation needed to explain the system to evaluators without hiding behind buzzwords.
Architecture
Open-source components wired into a practical monitoring flow.
Collect
Agents and sensors feed endpoint and network activity into the monitoring stack.
Detect
Wazuh rules and Suricata alerts surface suspicious behavior and policy-relevant events.
Search
ELK-style log handling makes events searchable and easier to investigate.
Alert
Email alerting and dashboards make the result visible instead of buried in terminal output.
Security decisions
Useful signal over decorative complexity.
- Used mature open-source security tools instead of inventing weak detection logic from scratch.
- Focused on visibility, investigation, and alerting rather than claiming magical prevention.
- Kept deployment and documentation central so the system could be repeated and evaluated.
- Designed the project around real constraints: cost, hardware limits, and operator understanding.
Outcome
A monitoring stack that can be deployed, explained, and evaluated.
Wazuh, ELK and Suricata run as one stack rather than three separate installs: agents report, rules fire on what matters, logs stay searchable, and an alert reaches a person instead of a terminal. The deployment and the documentation are part of the project, so someone else can stand it up and check it.
Next: the rest of the range.
Responses