Measuring the Hunt When You Find “Nothing”
Because sometimes success looks like silence.
Selling threat hunting is really easy when you find the next new APT hiding your environment, but what about when you don’t find any baddies?
Threat hunting is about more than stumbling into an IOC or running a query you find on GitHub. It’s not about chasing alerts in a prettier dashboard. And it’s definitely not about doing IR-lite with a cooler title. It’s a discipline, a mindset, and a force multiplier for your entire security program. It tests assumptions, exposes blind spots, and pushes your organization to detect what it couldn’t before.
But if you want anyone outside your team to understand that, you need to speak their language. From your CISO to the CFO, we have metrics for the boardroom to the whiteboard and everyone in between. If you want to get your bag (and your headcount) you have to sell your team and what they are doing.
Not vanity stats. Not warmed-over SOC KPIs. Real metrics that show what your team delivers, what ground it covers, and how well it runs.
In this post, we are going to break threat hunting metrics into three categories: Outputs, Coverage, and Operations. Together, they help you tell a clear story about impact, maturity, and where you go next.
Remember, no one funds vibes.
🎯 Outputs: What Did the Hunt Team Produce?
When people ask “What did your hunt team find?”, they’re usually looking for evidence of value. But outputs aren’t just about catching adversaries in the act. A strong threat hunt can reshape how your organization understands and responds to risk. Every single hunt should result in an output that improves the company’s security posture. These metrics focus on the concrete results of your hunthis, the things you can point to and say, we made this happen.
Outputs Created
This one’s straightforward: how much is your team actually producing that drives real impact? From here, you can break down outputs in more specific ways to show the depth and value of what you’re delivering.
Outputs by Domain
What type of outcome did the hunt produce? New detections? Process improvements? Control recommendations? You’ll want to define the domains that make the most sense for your environment and tailor them to how your leadership thinks about risk and impact.
Outputs by Criticality
How important are the outputs your team is producing? An output that would have directly led to threat discovery or prevention should rank high. If your team consistently generates high-criticality outcomes, that’s a strong justification for continued investment in the hunt function.
New Detections Created or Tuned
No proactive team is complete without influencing the reactive side of the house. Every hunt should contribute to better, faster detection. Creating or tuning detections decreases dwell time and improves visibility. If nothing else, each hunt should leave behind some detection related improvement.
Incidents Sourced from Hunts
Here’s your “baddie tracking” metric. How many incidents were uncovered during a hunt or as a direct result of one? These are threats that would have gone unnoticed without proactive investigation. This metric is often the most compelling to stakeholders and a clear proof point of value.
Control Gaps Identified
Control or visibility gaps deserve their own spotlight. While they fall under output domains, these findings are critical to call out. Gaps in logging, monitoring, or enforcement often go undetected until someone intentionally goes looking. A dedicated hunt team creates more opportunities for exactly that kind of targeted probing.
Each of these can be raw count or can be transformed into a percentage of total outputs to show where your program is efficient or deficient.
🏞 Coverage: What Ground Did the Hunt Team Explore?
Coverage metrics help you show how broadly and deeply your team is exploring the attack surface, threat landscape, and business environment. You’re not just tracking “where you looked” but you’re showing how your program is evolving, aligning to risk, and building visibility where it matters most.
MITRE ATT&CK or Kill Chain Phase
Pick your framework and stick with it. You want to show the breadth and depth of the things you’re hunting, and you need a consistent way to track that. Personally, I think ATT&CK offers more potential insights for tuning your program and uncovering blind spots. You can represent this coverage as a heatmap, a percentage, or a count of unique techniques.
Bonus: Track this by tactic to see if you're over-indexed on execution and missing lateral movement or exfiltration.
Data Sources Available/Unavailable
This pairs well with control gap tracking, but here the focus is whether you had access to the right data to complete the hunt. Why does this matter? It adds a degree of confidence to your results and flags hunts to revisit later when visibility improves. It also helps inform tooling investments or highlights the need for hunter training if your team is stuck in the EDR comfort zone.
Hunts by Technology
Where are you hunting? Cloud? Endpoints? Identity infrastructure? Hunts should reflect the organization’s actual attack surface. Focusing on a single part of the stack creates blind spots. This metric also opens doors for collaboration across business units and can support the case for additional access, visibility, or investment.
Hunts by Area of Business
Not all areas of the business are created equally. If you keep hunting in the same AD domain, you might miss key discrepancies that a threat actor could exploit. If your business is acquisition heavy, you may want to spend more time on areas that haven’t integrated fully or have a high rate of incidents. Work with your risk teams to identify where critical parts of the business are and give them some extra love. Again, this is another opportunity to highlight the team’s values and partner with key stakeholders. Get that strategic alignment.
Hunts by Threat Actor, Campaign, or CTI
Your hunts have to be relevant to your organization's threat model. Tracking by threat actor, campaign, or other CTI can ensure relevancy and also help answer the question “well, what are we doing about Scattered Spider?” when your CISO sees something in the Wall Street Journal. Some hunt teams are more TTP based, and that is ok, but don’t forget to throw in the occasional threat actor or campaign tracking to round out the story you are telling.
⚙️ Operations: How Is the Hunt Team Running?
Outputs and coverage show the what and where. Operations tell the story of how. These are the metrics that help you understand team health, identify blockers, and drive improvements over time. They’re the ones you reach for when someone asks, “How efficient is this team?” or “What’s getting in their way?”
Most of the time, these are metrics for frontline leaders, not the boardroom. They should be treated as leading indicators and used to rapidly adjust your team structure, process, or support when something starts to look off.
Hunts Completed
Start with the basics. How many hunts did the team complete in a given time frame? This gives you a baseline pulse and helps show consistency or growth over time. This should never be how you sell your team and should not be used to prove value.
To be even more clear, number of hunts does not mean you are doing better or worse. This is a metric that is needed to help with resourcing or understand if your process is too cumbersome. This is not to prove to your CISO that your team is full of rockstars. If you use this to sell your team, all that will result is your team rushing to get big numbers versus quality hunting.
more hunts ≠ better team
bigger numbers ≠ more success
(don’t be Kylo please)
Hunt Repeated
Now here’s where the count of hunts gets interesting. How many times are you redoing the same hunts?
Repeated hunts can signal a few things, like slow detection pipelines, unclear outcomes, or shallow scoping. If you’re running the same hunt more than twice, it may be time to shift that work into a detection engineering or operationalized workflow.
There’s too much surface area in most organizations to keep revisiting the same hypothesis over and over again.
Backlogged Hunts
How many hunts are sitting in the queue compared to how many are being worked or completed?
This is another resourcing and prioritization signal. If demand on the team is high and your backlog is growing, this is your job req justification metric.
Bonus: Create a ratio of backlogged to completed hunts. If the ratio is greater than 3:1, your team is likely under pressure. Use this ratio in combination with your other metrics to build a picture of operational health.
Ratio
1:1
You’re working everything that comes in. Possibly under-demanded or under-documented.
3:1
Healthy prioritization and strong pipeline. You’re choosing quality over quantity.
5:1 or more
High demand or possible resource constraint. Great signal of value, but time to scale.
10:1 or higher
Likely team burnout and missing ability to prioritize key work.
Average Hunt Duration
This helps you understand whether hunts are scoped well. If they’re taking too long, you might have a scoping issue, tooling friction, or process delays. If they’re too short, you might not be digging deep enough. This metric also helps set expectations for stakeholders.
If you follow the PEAK framework, during the Prepare phase, you may also challenge hunters to give estimates on how long a hunt would take. If the guess is way off from the actual, it can help be a point of realignment with the team or a trigger to look for more efficiencies.
Teams Worked With
Hunts can’t happen in a bubble. Who are your stakeholders and who are your partners? Having a diverse amount of teams that your hunt team works with will elevate your threat hunts and help focus work in areas that are meaningful to the business.
This can be a raw count of teams or you can mark hunts as “cross team collaboration” and do a count of collaborative hunts.
Tools Used
This goes hand in hand with the hunt by technology and data source tracking, but this tells you what tools your team gravitates toward. It can push for more advanced training in heavily used tools or identify investments for missing tools. This can also highlight who your SMEs are and open up opportunities for cross training.
Hunt Activity by Day and Hour
Are your hunters operating during business hours or non-business hours? Generally, this work is proactive and should not require significant off hours activity. If your hunters are getting called into hunt during weekends or at 2 AM, it may be time to reexamine their job role and the team structure. This can also give you an idea of when your team is able to get ahold of other teams for cross collaboration work.
This isn’t about tracking hours punitively. It’s about spotting patterns. Off hours hunting can indicate team burnout, IR bleed over, or a need to reframe team expectations. It can also highlight times when cross team collaboration is easier or harder to achieve.
🔥Burnout Indicators
Let’s talk burnout for a minute (since I mentioned it.)
Cybersecurity is a demanding role. Hunting is no exception. I have seen threat hunters put exceptional pressure on themselves to find the worst of the worst, and when they don’t, they act like they are failures.
Threat hunting managers should use the metrics in the operations section to watch for early signs of burnout in their team. Completing less hunts or hunts taking longer to complete can be a sign something is wrong, or the backlog ratio reaching severe levels.
Operations metrics should be used to monitor the health of your team and correct issues before they begin to show in other, more executive facing, metrics.
Make sure you’re building in non-hunt time for research, side projects, or just decompression. Celebrate all hunts equally, even when they don’t end with a big discovery. And track context switching closely. Asking someone to hunt proactively and then immediately shift into reactive incident response work without warning is a fast track to fatigue.
Taking care of your people is part of the mission. A healthy hunt team is a sustainable one.
Threat hunting isn’t always flashy. Sometimes the biggest wins are the ones no one sees. Things like better detections, reduced risk, and a stronger understanding of your environment. But if you want your team to thrive, grow, and get the support it needs, you have to show your work.
Metrics give you the language to tell that story. Not to chase vanity numbers, but to demonstrate impact, identify areas to improve, and protect your people along the way.
Hunt with purpose. Measure what matters. And never forget that finding nothing is still finding something.