What Good Looks Like in an Agentic SOC (and the Five Questions That Prove It)

**Executive summary:** This blog post defines what the author calls a 'governed agentic SOC'—an autonomous security operations capability that reasons across tools while remaining auditable—and provides five practical questions and an eight-stage lifecycle to use when evaluating vendor products, arguing buyers should test failure paths, legibility, approval gating, audit-as-investigation, and tenant-scoped learning rather than relying on demos.