Building Incident Response Dashboard

When to Use

Use this skill when:

• IR teams need real-time dashboards during active incidents for coordination and tracking
• SOC leadership requires operational dashboards showing incident status and analyst workload
• Post-incident reviews need visual timelines and impact assessments
• Executive briefings require high-level incident metrics and trend analysis

Do not use for day-to-day SOC monitoring dashboards (use Incident Review instead) — IR dashboards are designed for active incident coordination and management reporting.

Prerequisites

• SIEM platform (Splunk with Dashboard Studio, Elastic Kibana, or Grafana)
• Notable event and incident data in SIEM (Splunk ES incident_review index)
• Ticketing system integration (ServiceNow, Jira) for remediation tracking
• Asset and identity lookup tables for context enrichment
• Dashboard publishing access for SOC team and management distribution

Workflow

Step 1: Design Active Incident Dashboard Layout

Build a Splunk Dashboard Studio dashboard for active incident tracking:

<dashboard version="2" theme="dark">
  <label>Active Incident Response Dashboard</label>
  <description>Real-time tracking for IR-2024-0450</description>

  <row>
    <panel>
      <title>Incident Summary</title>
      <single>
        <search>
          <query>
| makeresults
| eval incident_id="IR-2024-0450",
       status="CONTAINMENT",
       severity="Critical",
       affected_hosts=7,
       contained_hosts=5,
       iocs_identified=23,
       hours_elapsed=round((now()-strptime("2024-03-15 14:00","%Y-%m-%d %H:%M"))/3600,1)
| table incident_id, status, severity, affected_hosts, contained_hosts, iocs_identified, hours_elapsed
          </query>
        </search>
      </single>
    </panel>
  </row>
</dashboard>

Step 2: Build Real-Time Affected Systems Panel

Track affected systems and their containment status:

| inputlookup ir_affected_systems.csv
| eval status_color = case(
    status="Contained", "#2ecc71",
    status="Compromised", "#e74c3c",
    status="Investigating", "#f39c12",
    status="Recovered", "#3498db",
    1=1, "#95a5a6"
  )
| stats count by status
| eval order = case(status="Compromised", 1, status="Investigating", 2,
                    status="Contained", 3, status="Recovered", 4)
| sort order
| table status, count

--- Detailed host table
| inputlookup ir_affected_systems.csv
| lookup asset_lookup_by_cidr ip AS host_ip OUTPUT category, owner, priority
| table hostname, host_ip, category, owner, status, containment_time,
        compromise_vector, analyst_assigned
| sort status, hostname

Step 3: Build IOC Tracking Panel

Monitor IOC spread across the environment:

--- IOCs identified during incident
index=* (src_ip IN ("185.234.218.50", "45.77.123.45") OR
         dest IN ("evil-c2.com", "malware-drop.com") OR
         file_hash IN ("a1b2c3d4...", "e5f6a7b8..."))
earliest="2024-03-14"
| stats count AS hits, dc(src_ip) AS unique_sources,
        dc(dest) AS unique_dests, latest(_time) AS last_seen
  by sourcetype
| sort - hits

--- IOC timeline
index=* (src_ip IN ("185.234.218.50") OR dest="evil-c2.com")
earliest="2024-03-14"
| timechart span=1h count by sourcetype

--- New IOC discovery tracking
| inputlookup ir_ioc_list.csv
| stats count by ioc_type, source, discovery_time
| sort discovery_time
| table discovery_time, ioc_type, ioc_value, source, status

Step 4: Build Response Timeline Panel

Create chronological incident timeline:

| inputlookup ir_timeline.csv
| sort _time
| eval phase = case(
    action_type="detection", "Detection",
    action_type="triage", "Triage",
    action_type="containment", "Containment",
    action_type="eradication", "Eradication",
    action_type="recovery", "Recovery",
    1=1, "Other"
  )
| eval phase_color = case(
    phase="Detection", "#e74c3c",
    phase="Triage", "#f39c12",
    phase="Containment", "#e67e22",
    phase="Eradication", "#2ecc71",
    phase="Recovery", "#3498db"
  )
| table _time, phase, action, analyst, details

Example timeline data:

_time,action_type,action,analyst,details
2024-03-15 14:00,detection,Alert triggered - Cobalt Strike beacon detected,splunk_es,Notable event NE-2024-08921
2024-03-15 14:12,triage,Alert triaged - confirmed true positive,analyst_jdoe,VT score 52/72 on beacon hash
2024-03-15 14:23,containment,Host WORKSTATION-042 isolated,analyst_jdoe,CrowdStrike network isolation

…