IDS Systems are the bane of all IT budgets. They spit enough information out that our bosses and industry “experts” say we have to have them. Yet we find ourselves under mountains of alerts and logs that can get to petabyte levels. As salesmen and bosses tell us to turn on all the switches. So, how do we decide what switches to turn on and how do we preserve our budgets / lives in the process? In my presentation I will walk through some of the flaw with IDS’s, how you can work through them, what resources are available, how we can use these tools to inform our co-workers and most of all how you can budget the running of an IDS.