A security incident can begin with a question your business can no longer answer: who changed that account?
If the relevant records were never collected, the team may have to reconstruct the answer from people's recollections. If the records exist but nobody knows how to retrieve them, the first hours become a search for the evidence instead of a review of it.
The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security recommends a logging and monitoring plan covering important events, retention and review. It also recommends protecting stored logs against tampering. Those are different jobs, and each needs an owner.
For a small business, I'd begin with the systems that hold customer information or control access to it. Ask the provider to show what happens when an administrator is added, a recovery method changes or someone exports data. The answer should be a record you can find, not a sentence in the sales agreement.
Then check the next step. Who receives an alert? Who covers an absence? Can they distinguish the event time from the time the alert arrived? A notification going to an unattended mailbox is a rather quiet monitoring service.
Retention needs a business decision too. Work out how far back an investigation may need to go and what your service actually retains. Avoid collecting passwords, tokens or unnecessary personal information just because storage is cheap.
I'd test the process with an agreed, harmless administrative event in a test environment. Find the record and follow the alert to its owner. Write down what was missing.
The useful result is being able to answer a real question with a record you can trust. A dashboard alone can't do that for you.
The Breach Readiness Interview from Black Ice Labs is a starting point for a security-readiness conversation. It does not certify the security of a business.