Endpoint visibility is fundamental to many of the processes that underpin effective endpoint security: data collection, monitoring, alerting (including alert analysis), and comprehensive threat detection and response.
Trouble is, the number, types, locations, and use cases of endpoints are constantly in flux, due to user comings and goings, role changes, broad use of virtual instances and cloud-based workloads, Internet of Things (IoT) proliferation, hybrid work, and numerous other factors. As a result, enterprise endpoints are increasingly difficult to see, manage, and secure.
The first step for any enterprise looking to develop effective endpoint security controls and accurately monitor and respond to endpoint threats is to establish detailed, ongoing visibility into its endpoints.
What is Endpoint Visibility?
Endpoint visibility, in the context of cybersecurity, is the ability to discover, identify, and classify endpoints on an ongoing basis, as well as to monitor and understand what behaviors and actions occur on endpoint devices across an organization’s network.
Endpoint visibility is a critical IT hygiene activity not only for security, but also IT operations, as it is necessary to determine whether a device is connected to the network, functioning properly, and performing as expected. Without visibility, an organization can’t effectively manage, monitor, govern, or control endpoints.
Comprehensive endpoint visibility within an organization should include:
- Asset discovery, identification, and classification
- Establishment and updating of an asset inventory
- Real-time monitoring of processes, applications, and user activity
- Status and logs related to network connection and communications
- File and system change tracking
- Security agent status
- Analytics-based behavioral event monitoring (often powered by AI) and logging
Endpoint visibility is simpler in concept than execution, and organizations (due to factors we’ll discuss below), often struggle to achieve full visibility, unintentionally hindering their security goals and increasing their cyber risk.
Explore how endpoint visibility can reduce risk and stop threats from escalating with the 2025 Arctic Wolf Security Operations Report.
Endpoint Visibility and Endpoint Management
Endpoint visibility and endpoint management are two distinct functions within endpoint security, but they are also interdependent.
Endpoint management — which refers to the deployment, configuration, management, and maintenance of endpoints to ensure they remain secure, compliant, and functional — is only possible if an organization has comprehensive endpoint visibility into their endpoints.
It can include operational tasks such as configuration management, software license management, software update management, vulnerability management, remote device control, inventory management, and compliance assurance; can help harden the endpoint attack surface; and can reduce risk.
Endpoint visibility not only provides key data related to endpoint management tasks but facilitates proactive endpoint security. For example, endpoint visibility can help identify misconfigured endpoints, and effective endpoint management can ensure software update and patching processes and polices are enforced promptly, closing off an attack opportunity for adversaries before an attack can ever begin.
Why Endpoint Visibility Is a Struggle for Organizations
It’s clear that organizations are having difficulty achieving full endpoint visibility. According to The State of Cybersecurity: 2025 Trends Report, only 40% of security leaders surveyed for the report indicated that they have 100% endpoint security coverage, and expect to maintain that level of coverage in the future. That means over half of organizations are aware that they have some insecure endpoints, obscured by a lack of visibility, which, in turn, creates new risks on an attack surface favored by threat actors.
There can be a multitude of reasons organizations struggle with endpoint visibility, including but not limited to:
- IT and security teams’ inability to keep up with a growing endpoint and/or user base within their organization.
- Bring your own device (BYOD) polices that may allow for potentially unaccounted for personal devices, such as personal cell phones or tablets.
- Proliferation of IoT devices or legacy endpoint devices that may be unaccounted for or have legacy or non-standard software and operating systems that makes them more difficult to detect and/or monitor.
- Shadow IT, or the unauthorized use of any apps, devices, services, technologies, solutions, and infrastructure without the knowledge, approval, and support of the IT department, which can create risk within endpoints due to lack of knowledge and visibility by IT and security teams into these devices or applications.
- Device mobility has increased in recent years, meaning employees and users may be utilizing endpoints through unsafe public Wi-Fi, in various geographic locations, or at odd hours, making it hard to distinguish normal from abnormal endpoint behavior.
- Isolated security solutions that do not integrate with, or consistently communicate with, the larger network, including network security solutions, creating security and operations silos or blind spots.
- Endpoint alert noise and subsequent alert fatigue, which can lead to security teams missing or downplaying endpoint alerts, inadvertently increasing risk.
- Security sprawl, where too many isolated security tools are in place, creating information silos and complicating detection and response.
How To Achieve Endpoint Visibility
Due to the dynamic nature of today’s IT environments, achieving endpoint visibility is not a “one-and-done” project for most organizations. That challenge can be attributed to tooling, processes, management, or several other variables, underscoring that both achieving and maintaining full visibility is an ongoing challenge.
Steps to achieve endpoint visibility include:
1. Implement endpoint discovery mechanisms. This should function on an ongoing basis to discover both new endpoints and endpoints that have changed in status; to identify and validate key information about the device, including its device type, operating system, location, and other key statistics; and to classify each device according to a pre-determined schema, so that common devices can be grouped according to categories, such as business unit, user role, location, BYOD, etc.
2. Inventory all endpoints to create an up-to-date record. This will help ensure that there is no shadow IT, or new, connected devices your organization was unaware of. This pertains to older, out-of-use endpoints as well. Utilizing asset discovery and management tools can help this process by identifying unmanaged or unknown devices that are connected to the network, as well as automating much of the process related to creating and updating the inventory as needed.
3. Deploy an endpoint management solution (optional). This technology is often used to both deploy, and update, endpoint detection and response (EDR) agents on endpoints, particularly within larger enterprise environments. This solution can facilitate visibility and telemetry as well.
4. Deploy endpoint security solutions, such as EDR, which often includes integrated endpoint protection platform (EPP) functions. EDR will connect to, and bring in security telemetry from all endpoints, providing real-time data into the behavior, activities, and health of your organizations’ endpoints. Other key visibility features of EDR include: tracking endpoint activity,; detecting threats,; supporting investigations and response,; monitoring against known and unknown threats, collecting and analyze endpoint logs,; and providing endpoint vulnerability scanning tooling.
5. Fine tune real-time monitoring and alerting. Every organization’s monitoring and alerting needs are different, so taking the time to fine-tune your EDR solution (whether in-house or, if greater experience and support is needed, with the assistance of a third-party team) can not only ensure visibility, but also ensure that your teams are receiving the right information in the right volume and intervals. It’s best if the telemetry from this monitoring and alerting feeds into a single, centralized system for threat detection, investigation, and response.
6. Integrate your endpoint security solution into your broader tech stack. Siloed data and security operations can increase risk and inhibit security goals. By integrating your security solution (and subsequent telemetry), both your technology and IT and security teams will be able to contextualize data, detections, and responses, allowing for faster, better security outcomes.
7. Ensure logs and data are searchable and have set retention periods. Historical data can be vital for threat or incident investigations and can help your organization understand your own endpoint security gaps for future improvements. Often, endpoint security solutions will have log visibility capabilities included, but it’s important to see if data exploring and retention functions are also available and what those specific capabilities entail.
8. Continually assess and improve technology, processes, and operations to increase and maintain endpoint visibility. As an organization matures, and grows, that process will naturally affect endpoints — which ones are added, which are discontinued, what applications are permitted on them, and how users are interacting with them — so endpoint visibility processes will need to be continually assessed and updated to ensure proper visibility, scale, resilience, and security are maintained.
Endpoint Visibility and Comprehensive Security with Arctic Wolf
Arctic Wolf® understands that visibility is the key to unlocking comprehensive endpoint security and elevating your overall security maturity. Arctic Wolf Aurora™ Endpoint Security is designed to meet your organization where you’re at — with or without 24×7 monitoring. But no matter how your team configures our solutions, you’ll receive centralized reporting, faster incident investigations, a reduction in alert fatigue, and enhanced endpoint security.
Arctic Wolf also believes that security shouldn’t exist in a silo, so we partner with leading technology companies to ensure seamless integrations and full telemetry availability, allowing you to fully see, and respond to, what’s happening not just on your endpoints but within your entire IT environment.
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Gain a better understanding of the endpoint security marketplace and how to evaluate solutions with A Practical Guide for Solving Endpoint Security Challenges.
