Yes, its a distro with a bunch of tools. The tools are deployed together into a web app suite.
Security Onion is firstly an IDS. Intrusion Detection System.
The base install needs 2 NICs, a management NIC and an operational NIC. It's a probe.
It also supports an army of Elastic Agents installed at sites or subnets.
The package allows you to flag events via Suricata (I think that's what's behind Hunt), escalate Cases to track them, search the data in a surprising amount of ways, and drill right down to the packet level (that's Wireshark). There's a bunch of InfluxDB graphing. A thing called CyberChef that is a fukin badass on-the-fly decoding and decryption tool to open up the packets you gather.
Honestly, I'm just getting started. But if you hired a security analyst to watch your network, you'd want them checking this every day, digging in shit, sending you reports, escalating cases to you.
