Investigate events in Timeline

Use Timeline as your workspace for investigations and threat hunting. You can add alerts from multiple indices to a Timeline to facilitate advanced investigations.

You can drag or send fields of interest to a Timeline to create the desired query. For example, you can add fields from tables and histograms on the Overview, Alerts, Hosts, and Network pages, as well as from other Timelines. Alternatively, you can add a query directly in Timeline by clicking + 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 later review. 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 alerts in Timeline. You can select whether the fields use predefined values or values retrieved from the alert. For more information, refer to About Timeline templates.

You can select whether Timeline displays detection alerts and other raw events, or just alerts. By default, Timeline displays both raw events and alerts. To hide raw events and display alerts only, click Data view to the right of the date and time picker, then select Show only detection alerts.

To further inspect an event or detection alert, click the View details button. A flyout with event or alert details appears.

Many types of events automatically appear in preconfigured views that provide relevant contextual information, called Event Renderers. You can display and turn them on or off with the Settings menu in the upper left corner of the results pane:

The example above displays the Flow event renderer, which highlights the movement of data between its source and destination. If you see a particular part of the rendered event that interests you, you can drag it up to the drop zone below the query bar for further investigation.

You can also modify a Timeline’s display in other ways:

By placing fields within the drop zone, you turn them into query filters. Their relative placement specifies their logical relationships: horizontally adjacent filters use AND, while vertically adjacent filters use OR.

Click a filter to access additional operations such as Add filter, Clear all, Load saved query, and more:

Here are examples of various types of filters:

To attach a Timeline to a new or existing case, open it, click Attach to case in the upper right corner, then select either Attach to new case or Attach to existing case.

To learn more about cases, refer to 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.

To export Timelines:

To import Timelines:

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: