I've recently been putting time into projects and labs. I started small with a packet sniffer using scapy then ramped it up with a SOC dashboard using Streamlit both built in pure python. You can see my post about these and if you ever get stuck i'll happily help you all out.
BUT... this for me has been a real win. This is my home lab to begin the real SOC projects. I've got:
Windows Victim: To simulate a target to be attacked.
Kali Attacker: To Simulate an attacker
Wazuh: This monitors it all and brings it together.