Investigate events in Timeline

Use Timeline as your workspace for investigations and threat hunting. Data from multiple indices can be added to a Timeline, which enables investigating complex threats.

You can drag or send items of interest to Timeline to create the query you need to investigate an alert or event. You can add items from tables and histograms on the Overview, Alerts, Hosts, and Network pages, as well as from within a Timeline itself. Additionally, you can add a query directly in Timeline (click + Add field).

Timelines are responsive, and they persist as you move through the Elastic Security app collecting data. Auto-saving ensures that the results of your investigation are available for review by other analysts and incident response teams. To record and share your findings with others, attach your Timeline to a case.

In addition to Timelines, you can create and attach Timeline templates to detection rules. Timeline templates allow you to define the source event fields used when you investigate a detections alert in Timeline. You can select whether the fields use predefined values or values retrieved from the alert. For more information, see About Timeline templates.

Using the drop-down options by the KQL bar, you can select whether alerts, other raw events, or both are displayed in the Timeline.

Many events in Timeline are presented in easy-to-follow rendered views that include relevant contextual information. These views are called Event Renderers, and they can be configured via the Settings icon in the upper left corner of the result’s pane:

The example above displays a flow event renderer. If you see a particular item that interests you, you can drag it to the dropzone for further investigation.

Other display options include:

You can specify logical AND and OR operations with an item’s placement in the drop area. Multiple horizontal filters use AND logic, vertical filters use OR.

Click a filter to access additional operations such as exclude, temporarily disable, or delete items from the query:

This is how the filters appear in the UI:

To attach a Timeline to a new or existing case, open it, click Attach to case in the upper right corner, then select one of these:

For more information about cases, see Cases.

You can view, duplicate, export, delete, and create templates from existing Timelines:

You can export and import Timelines, which enables you to share Timelines from one Kibana space or instance to another. Exported Timelines are saved as .ndjson files.

Use the Correlation tab to investigate Timeline results with EQL queries.

When forming EQL queries, you can write a basic query to return a list of events and alerts. Or, you can create sequences of EQL queries to view matched, ordered events across multiple event categories. Sequence queries are useful for identifying and predicting related events. They can also provide a more complete picture of potential adversary behavior in your environment, which you can use to create or update rules and detection alerts.

The following image shows what matched ordered events look like in the Timeline table. Events that belong to the same sequence are matched together in groups and shaded red or blue. Matched events are also ordered from oldest to newest in each sequence.

From the Correlation tab, you can also do the following: