Splunk Dashboards

Dashboards transform ad-hoc searches into persistent monitoring. Well-designed dashboards answer recurring questions, surface important trends, and provide at-a-glance visibility into security posture.

Dashboard Design Principles

Purpose drives design. Before building, define what questions the dashboard answers. "What threats exist?" is too vague. "Are any endpoints communicating with known C2 infrastructure?" is actionable.

Audience matters. An analyst dashboard might show raw event counts and technical details. An executive dashboard might show trend lines and risk scores. Design for who will use it.

Simplicity enables understanding. Every visualization should communicate one idea clearly. Crowded dashboards with competing elements confuse more than they inform.

Visualization Selection

Single value panels show one important number—total alerts, mean time to respond, systems without agents.

Bar and column charts compare categories. Alerts by severity, events by source, top blocked domains.

Line charts show trends over time. Alert volume day over day, authentication failures hour by hour.

Tables present detailed data. Recent critical alerts with timestamps, affected systems, and status.

Maps show geographic distribution when location matters. Login sources, threat actor origins.

Building Searches for Dashboards

Dashboard searches should be efficient—they run repeatedly. Optimize for performance with specific time ranges, early filtering, and appropriate aggregation.

Consider time picker interaction. Dashboards often let users select time ranges. Ensure searches respect these inputs.

Drilldowns add interactivity. Clicking a bar might open a search for underlying events. Clicking a row might show full event details.

Alerts and Scheduled Reports

Beyond real-time dashboards, Splunk runs scheduled searches. Alerts trigger when conditions are met—new indicators matching threat intelligence, thresholds exceeded, patterns detected.

Configure alert actions appropriately. Critical findings might page on-call staff. Lower priority items might create tickets. Informational results might send email summaries.

Reports run on schedule and deliver results—daily summaries, weekly trends, compliance evidence. Schedule during off-peak hours to minimize performance impact.