SENTINEL-RL Architecture Splits SOC Reasoning to Tackle Scaling and Cost Limits

Security operations centers (SOCs) face severe performance bottlenecks when traditional platforms process authentication graph alerts through a single, tightly coupled pipeline that entangles semantic reasoning and graph traversal. Legacy SIEM and SOAR tools from 2020–2023 struggle in large environments, with simulations showing throughput failures in networks exceeding 2,000 hosts. SENTINEL-RL is an open reference architecture designed to address this by decoupling semantic and topological reasoning into two distinct processing pipelines. The dual-pipeline approach aims to reduce redundant LLM calls, lower operational costs, and improve throughput during multi-host incident investigations. However, real-world deployments reveal persistent failure modes, including stale semantic tags after graph mutations and context overflow errors that can disrupt autonomous SOC investigations.