6.1 Viewing and Triaging Alerts in Alert Views

To view and analyze alerts, you must first create the alert view. To configure the alert view, you must either be an administrator or have the Manage Alerts permission. For more information, see Visualizing and Analyzing Alerts in NetIQ Sentinel Administration Guide.“

6.1.1 Creating an Alert View

To view and analyze alerts, you must first configure the alert view.

To create an alert view:

  1. Log in to the Sentinel Web console.

  2. Click Real-time Views > Alert Views > the Create icon.

  3. Specify the following information:

    • Name: Specify a name for the alert view.

    • Sharing: Select either of the following options:

      • Public: Allow everyone to view the alert view. In the public mode, you are the owner of the alert view and other users cannot edit it.

      • Private: Only you will be able to view the alert view.

    • Data sources: Add other data sources from which you want to view alerts. For information about data sources, see Configuring Data Federation in the NetIQ Sentinel Administration Guide.

    • Criteria: Specify the criteria to filter the alerts.

    • Time range: Specify the time range for which you want to view alerts.

    • Use alert period: Select Created or Modified to view the alerts that were created or modified in the specified time range.

    • Tenant: If you are in a multi-tenant environment, select the department or the tenant name for which you want to view alerts.

      NOTE:This option is displayed only if you are an administrator in a multi-tenant environment. For information about multitenancy, see Configuring Sentinel for Multitenancy in the NetIQ Sentinel Administration Guide.

  4. Click Save to save the alert view.

6.1.2 Viewing Alerts

Sentinel provides a graphical and tabular representation of alerts that match the specified alert criteria. The charts represent the alerts overview information classified by Priority, State, and Severity. The alert view table displays only distinct alerts. Duplicate alerts are rolled up to a single distinct alert. For more information about rolling up of duplicate alerts, see Configuring Alert Creation in the NetIQ Sentinel Administration Guide. The alert view table provides information about an alert such as, severity, priority, owner, state, occurrences, and so on. Alerts from Sentinel servers in distributed location are distinguished by the Remote icon () next to the name of the alert. You can view the IP address of the remote Sentinel server by moving the mouse over the name of the alert.

NOTE:The alerts displayed in the alert view are filtered depending on the manage alert permissions and the tenancy of the user role. For more information about permission to manage alerts, see Configuring Roles and Users in the NetIQ Sentinel Administration Guide.

To create customized charts and tables for further analysis of the alert data, see Section 6.2, Analyzing Alert Dashboards.

To view alert views:

  1. In the Sentinel Web interface, click Real-time Views > Alert Views.

  2. Select the desired alert view and click the Open alerts view icon.

As you visualize and monitor alerts, you can perform the following activities in the alert view:

  • Mouse over the charts to determine the number of alerts based on alert states, priority, and severity.

  • Sort alerts based on one or more columns in the table. Press Shift+click to select multiple columns to sort. By default, the alert view table displays alerts based on the time when the alerts were triggered. Therefore, the latest alerts are listed on the top in the table.

  • Assign alerts to a user or a role, including yourself or your role.

  • Modify the alert state to indicate the progress on the alert investigation.

  • Add comments to the alert to indicate the changes you made to the alert, which helps you to keep an up-to-date record of the alert investigation. For example, you can add comments when you change the state of a specific alert or when you have gathered more information about the alert. Providing specific comments allows you to accumulate knowledge about a particular instance of the alert and track how a particular condition was addressed. Comments are important in tracking the alert, particularly if the process of resolving the alert spans several users or roles.

  • View events that triggered the alert and drill-down further to the extent of viewing the user identities that triggered the event by clicking the View details icon in the alert view table.

    The Alert Details page displays a detailed information about an alert including the following:

    • Source: Displays the correlation rule that generated the alert. You can also annotate the correlation rule by adding information to the knowledge base so that future alerts generated by this correlation rule include the associated historical information.

    • Knowledge Base: Knowledge base is a repository that contains information about the conditions that resulted in the alert. It can also include information about resolution of a particular alert, which can help others resolve similar alerts in the future. Over time, you can collect a valuable knowledge base about the alert specific to a tenant or an enterprise.

      For example, an employee has recently joined the organization and does have the access permissions to a secured server. But this employee might not have been added yet to the authorized users list. Therefore, an alert is generated every time the employee tries to access the server. In such a case, you can add a note in the alert knowledge base to indicate that the “employee is approved to access the server, but is not yet listed in the authorized users list. This alert can be ignored and set to low priority.”

      NOTE:To view or edit the knowledge base, you must be an administrator or have the View Knowledge Base or Edit Knowledge Base permissions.

    • Alert Fields: Displays the alert fields that provide the following information:

      • who and what caused the alert

      • the assets affected

      • the taxonomic categories of the action that caused the alert, the outcome, and so on. For more information on taxonomy, see Sentinel Taxonomy.

      For more information about alert fields, click Tips on the top-right corner of the Sentinel Web interface.

    • Trigger Events: Displays the events that triggered the correlated event associated with the alert. You can determine the conditions that triggered the alert by examining the trigger events. By default, the Alert Details page displays 10000 trigger events per alert. You can also define this number as necessary. For more information, see Configuring the Number of Trigger Events to be Displayed in the Alert View in the NetIQ Sentinel Administration Guide.

    • Show history: Displays the changes made to the alert, which helps you track any actions taken on the alert.

    • Identities: Displays the list of users involved in the alert. This information helps you to investigate about the users involved in the alert and monitor their activities.

6.1.3 Creating Incidents from Alerts

If the potential threat that caused the alert is critical such that it needs immediate action or the threat indicates any security compromise, escalate the threat by creating an incident. You can associate the trigger events that caused the alert to an incident.

NOTE:You must be an administrator or have the View or create incidents and add events to incidents permission to create incidents.

To create incidents from alerts:

  1. In the Alert Details page > Source section, click the Open correlation overview icon.

  2. In the Rule Health Statistics section, click the Search events icon.

    The search result displays all the correlated events generated by the correlation rule associated to the alert.

  3. In the search results, click View triggers for a specific correlated event.

    The search result displays all the events that triggered the correlated event.

  4. In the search results, select the events you want to associate to the incident. Click Event Operations > Create Incidents or Add to incident. For more information about creating an incident from events, see Section 3.5.4, Creating an Incident. For information about adding events to an existing incident, see Section 3.5.3, Adding Events to an Incident.