Federal logging requirements changed quickly, and Knox moved just as quickly to operationalize them.
The Timeline:
- OMB published Memorandum M-26-14 on May 22, 2026, resetting the federal approach to logging around continuous event monitoring, threat hunting, investigation, response, and forensics.
- On August 20, 2026, CISA published the Logging Reference Architecture (LRA), turning those policy requirements into a practical architecture for federal agencies.
- By September 9, less than three weeks after CISA released the LRA, Knox had a production pilot operating against the new model.
We built a two-tier logging architecture that maps telemetry directly to the activity categories required under M-26-14, keeps detection-relevant events immediately available to our Cyber Fusion Center (CFC), and preserves full-fidelity telemetry separately for investigation and forensics.
What allowed us to move that quickly was that we did not treat the LRA as another compliance checklist. We translated the requirements directly into engineering decisions, tested them against real detection content, deployed them into production, and measured the results. This action is the difference between being compliant “on paper” and turning a new federal requirement into an operational security capability.
We analyzed the detection content itself and identified the events required for those detections to work. That allowed us to materially reduce unnecessary SIEM ingestion while also improving detection coverage by restoring telemetry that a previous filtering approach had unintentionally excluded. That is the part that matters most.
This effort is not about logging less. It is about knowing what matters, preserving what investigators will need later, and making sure the SOC can actually use the data.
Our current implementation demonstrates coverage across the major M-26-14 activity areas, including identity and authentication, network activity, privileged actions, endpoint telemetry, security alerts, and cloud administrative activity. We are continuing to close the remaining implementation details around certain data-access events and retention-tier search procedures as we move from pilot to broader deployment.
What Your Organization Should Do Now
1. Map logging to security outcomes, not products.
Do not start with what your SIEM collects. Start with what your defenders need to answer.
Ask: Who authenticated? What changed? What data was accessed? Was privilege elevated? Can you reconstruct the attack path?
Then map the required telemetry to those outcomes.
2. Separate detection from retention.
Not every event needs to sit in the most expensive analytics tier.
Keep the telemetry needed for continuous detection immediately searchable, while preserving full-fidelity records in a retention layer for investigation and forensics.
3. Continuously validate the pipeline.
Logs arriving do not mean the architecture works.
Test that events are generated, parsed correctly, available to detections, and retrievable when needed. Logging has to be treated like a production security capability.
Why This Matters
M-26-14 and the CISA Logging Reference Architecture give agencies an opportunity to build something better than the traditional “collect everything” model.
At Knox, our early results show that organizations do not have to choose between better detection and better cost control.
The real goal is simple: capture the right telemetry, keep it for the right amount of time, and make sure defenders can use it when it matters.
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