osquery vs Sigma
GitHub Stats
About osquery
osquery, developed at Facebook, exposes an operating system as a high-performance relational database. This allows you to write SQL queries to explore operating system data - running processes, loaded kernel modules, open network connections, browser plugins, hardware events, file hashes, and hundreds of other system attributes are all available as SQL tables. For security teams, this means you can query your fleet in real-time: 'SELECT * FROM processes WHERE name LIKE \'%miner%\'' finds cryptominers, 'SELECT * FROM listening_ports WHERE port = 4444' finds suspicious listeners. osquery supports scheduled queries that log differential changes over time, making it powerful for continuous security monitoring and compliance verification. It runs on Linux, macOS, Windows, and FreeBSD, and integrates with fleet management tools like Fleet (formerly Kolide) for centralized querying and alerting across thousands of endpoints.
About Sigma
Sigma is a generic and open signature format for SIEM systems, analogous to what YARA is for files and Snort is for network traffic. Sigma rules describe log events in a YAML-based format that is independent of any specific SIEM product. Using the sigma-cli converter (pySigma), rules can be translated into native query languages for Splunk (SPL), Elasticsearch (Lucene/KQL), Microsoft Sentinel, QRadar, CrowdStrike, Carbon Black, Grep, and over 30 other backends. The Sigma rule repository contains thousands of community-contributed detection rules covering MITRE ATT&CK techniques, common malware behaviors, lateral movement, persistence mechanisms, and suspicious system activity. Security teams use Sigma to write detection logic once and deploy it across their entire detection infrastructure, regardless of which SIEM products they use. The format is maintained by the SigmaHQ project and has become the de facto standard for shareable detection rules.
Platform Support
Tags
osquery only
Sigma only