SMSMC Blog
Tools & Strategic ReviewsOctober 2026 · 4 min read

CISA Retired Logging Made Easy Support: What NYS SMBs Should Do Instead

CISA retired support for Logging Made Easy effective May 22, 2026. The bits still exist, but nobody at CISA maintains them — here is a buyer’s checklist for NYS SMB logging without shelfware.

By Jim Venuto

CISA’s Logging Made Easy (LME) page now states plainly that LME remains on GitHub but is no longer being maintained. The project docs site posts an Important Service Notice: after a services review, CISA retired support for LME effective May 22, 2026. Organizations may keep running it; CISA will not maintain or support it.

That is a tools decision, not a nostalgia moment. SMBs and municipalities adopted LME because it was free, local, and “good enough” logging when nothing else fit the budget. If that is you — or your MSP quietly depended on it — you need a written plan before the next incident or cyber-insurance questionnaire asks who maintains your SIEM.

This Tools & Strategic Reviews piece is a procurement and oversight checklist, not a product endorsement. I will not crown a replacement winner from marketing pages. I will tell you what “good” must include now that the free federal maintenance path is closed.

What changed

  • Before: LME offered a no-cost, self-hosted stack (historically Elastic/Wazuh-oriented per CISA’s description) aimed at small and mid-sized organizations that otherwise had little detection capability.
  • After May 22, 2026: Same GitHub project may still install; no CISA maintenance or support. Security fixes, compatibility, and docs freshness are community/self risk.
  • CISA still points readers to related public guidance such as the joint advisory Best Practices for Event Logging and Threat Detection for logging baselines under resource constraints.

October’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month again lists logging among the “level up” practices. The federal message did not retire; only the free packaged maintainer did.

Who in NYS this hits

  • SMBs that deployed LME as their only central log store.
  • MSPs who standardized LME across tenants and have not disclosed the support retirement.
  • DFS-covered entities and HIPAA practices whose examiners/insurers ask for log retention, review evidence, and alerting — “we run LME” is no longer a complete answer without a maintenance owner.
  • SLED shops that chose LME to avoid SaaS data residency debates and now need a supported path.

Legacy reality check

Running unsupported detection infrastructure is itself a risk decision. If LME breaks on an OS upgrade, or a component CVE goes unpatched, you own the outage and the blind spot. That can be acceptable short-term with compensating monitoring — it is not acceptable as an unacknowledged perpetual plan.

AI GRC note

Whatever replaces LME will collect authentication, endpoint, and maybe AI-gateway logs. Require contractual clarity on where logs live, who can prompt them into AI assistants, and whether a vendor’s “AI SOC” sends your events to a shared model. Logging is privacy-relevant under SHIELD when logs contain private information.

Buyer’s checklist (use this in MSP/vendor RFPs)

Score each option 1–5. Reject anything that cannot evidence the Musts.

Must

  1. Named maintainer (vendor or MSP) with patch SLA — not “community might.”
  2. Coverage map: which identity, endpoint, email, firewall, and cloud admin logs are in scope on day 30.
  3. Retention meeting your policy/insurer/DFS or HIPAA needs, with tamper considerations.
  4. Alerting that a human will see — on-call or ticket integration, not a dashboard nobody opens.
  5. Export/search for IR within hours, not days.
  6. Written shared-responsibility diagram (what you configure vs. what they run).

Should

  1. Detection content aligned to common SMB threats (ransomware precursors, MFA fatigue, mail forwarding rules).
  2. Cost predictability at your seat count (no surprise ingest overages without caps).
  3. Ability to satisfy “logging” questions on cyber-insurance renewals with screenshots/exports.

Avoid

  1. Shelfware SIEM licensed “for compliance” with no tuned rules and no reviewer.
  2. Replacing LME with another unmaintained GitHub stack without an owner.
  3. Vendor demos that never show your log sources.

Decision paths (pick one in writing)

  • A. Stay on LME temporarily: Document risk acceptance, freeze date (e.g. 90 days), compensating EDR/M365 alerting, and the named engineer who watches breakages.
  • B. MSP-provided logging/XDR: Contract the Must list; demand monthly evidence pack.
  • C. Commercial SIEM/logging SaaS: Same Must list; pilot on identity + endpoint first.
  • D. Hyperscaler-native (e.g. Microsoft Sentinel / equivalent) if you are already all-in on that cloud — still require tuning and an owner.

This week’s actions

  1. Ask your MSP in a ticket: “Do we run LME anywhere? Who maintains it after CISA’s May 22, 2026 support retirement?”
  2. If yes, open a risk-acceptance or migration project with a date.
  3. Map current log sources vs. CISA Awareness Month logging expectation and AA24-234A practices at a high level.
  4. Put the Must checklist into the next renewal or audit/cyber-insurance prep folder.

What “done” looks like

  • Inventory of logging tools with maintainer status.
  • Chosen path A–D with owner and date.
  • One month of evidence that someone reviewed alerts.

LME was a gift while CISA maintained it. After May 22, 2026, free without a maintainer is just unpaid risk. Buy (or task) maintenance explicitly.

Sources

Tags#smb#sled#tool-review#msp#practitioner#checklist