building-incident-response-dashboard

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