/building-incident-response-dashboard

name: building-incident-response-dashboard
description: 'Builds real-time incident response dashboards in Splunk, Elastic, or Grafana to provide SOC analysts and leadership
  with situational awareness during active incidents, tracking affected systems, containment status, IOC spread, and response
  timeline. Use when IR teams need unified visibility during incident coordination and post-incident reporting.

  '
domain: cybersecurity
subdomain: soc-operations
tags:
- soc
- dashboard
- incident-response
- splunk
- visualization
- situational-awareness
- metrics
version: '1.0'
author: mahipal
license: Apache-2.0
nist_csf:
- DE.CM-01
- DE.AE-02
- RS.MA-01
- DE.AE-06

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
2024-03-15 14:35,containment,C2 domain blocked on firewall,analyst_msmith,Palo Alto rule deployed
2024-03-15 15:00,eradication,Enterprise-wide IOC scan initiated,analyst_jdoe,Splunk search across all indices
2024-03-15 15:30,containment,3 additional hosts identified and isolated,analyst_msmith,Lateral movement confirmed
2024-03-15 16:00,eradication,Malware removed from all affected hosts,analyst_tier3,CrowdStrike RTR cleanup
2024-03-15 18:00,recovery,Systems restored and monitored,analyst_msmith,72-hour monitoring period started

Step 5: Build SOC Operations Dashboard

Track overall SOC performance metrics:

--- Incident volume by severity (last 30 days)
index=notable earliest=-30d
| stats count by urgency
| eval order = case(urgency="critical", 1, urgency="high", 2, urgency="medium", 3,