Temperature in SLMs: Impact on Incident Categorization in On-Premises Environments

SOCs and CSIRTs face increasing pressure to automate incident categorization, yet the use of cloud-based LLMs introduces costs, latency, and confidentiality risks. We investigate whether locally executed SLMs can meet this challenge. We evaluated 21 models ranging from 1B to 20B parameters, varying the temperature hyperparameter and measuring execution time and precision across two distinct architectures. The results indicate that temperature has little influence on performance, whereas the number of parameters and GPU capacity are decisive factors.