Oh, the sacred Incident Review workflow. The crown jewel of the ES interface that everyone seems to revere. Let me just adjust my rose-tinted glasses for a moment… ah, yes, I see it now: a masterpiece of clunkiness. You are not alone in feeling like you’re wrestling an octopus to triage a simple phishing alert.
My team’s journey with this particular “feature” has been a saga of frustration punctuated by occasional, reluctant acceptance. The core issue, as I see it, is that the workflow was architected for a theoretical, linear investigation by a single analyst in a vacuum, not for the messy, collaborative, and often parallel reality of a modern SOC. The constant context-switching between the Incident Review panel, search, Investigate, and Asset/Identity manager feels less like a workflow and more like a punitive tab-management exercise.
We’ve attempted several… let’s call them “unauthorized modifications” to make it tolerable. None are perfect, but they beat praying for a vendor roadmap update.
First, we essentially abandoned using the Incident Review panel as anything more than a glorified queue. The moment we open an event, we pivot almost entirely to the Search & Reporting app. We built a custom dashboard that replicates key Incident Review actions (status changes, urgency, assignment) but sits alongside our own investigation panels, correlation searches, and data enrichment lookups. This keeps the context on one screen. It’s a duct-tape solution, but it reduces tab sprawl by about 70%.
Second, we aggressively use the `notable_events` index for our own purposes. We append our own notes, analyst summaries, and key artifact timelines directly to the event via simple custom fields. This creates a shared scratchpad that survives the awkward refresh cycles of the default UI. It’s shocking how much smoother handoffs become when the next shift isn’t trying to reconstruct your thought process from the activity log.
Finally, and this is the most contrarian point: we stopped trying to make ES *be* our SOAR. For repetitive, low-risk triage steps, we built lightweight external scripts (Python, of course) that interact with the Splunk API to fetch notable details, run enrichment, and post back disposition. This offloads the manual click-drudgery from the clunky UI. The purists will gasp at the “frankenstack,” but efficiency rarely wears a purity badge.
I’m deeply curious what others have cobbled together. Are you still suffering in silence, navigating the default maze? Or have you also taken matters into your own hands with custom dashboards, external integrations, or outright rebellion against the prescribed path? What’s your most effective workaround for the collaborative black hole that is the standard Incident Review?
—Bella
Price ≠ value.
Oh, the pivot to Search & Reporting is key. My team did the exact same thing, basically using the Incident Review just to assign ownership and track status.
The real pain point we hit was the sheer overhead of reconstructing the investigation path for handoffs or escalations. Since we're not using the built-in workflow, you lose that thread. We ended up creating a simple custom action that logs our major search pivots and key decisions as analyst notes back into the incident. It's a band-aid, but it makes the context stick.
Any chance you've looked into the API for that queue you mentioned? I'm curious if you've automated pulling events out of the panel entirely into a custom dashboard.
Clean code is not an option, it's a sanity measure.
Hah, the "punitive tab-management exercise" is such a perfect way to put it. That's exactly how it feels!
I'm just starting out and this gives me a lot to think about. When you say you pivot to Search & Reporting almost immediately, does your team have a standard set of saved searches or a dashboard you jump to first, or is it a fresh build every time? Trying to figure out what a good starting point looks like.
Thanks for sharing your real-world experience, it's super helpful.
That pivot to Search & Reporting is the only sane path. The moment you try to use the Incident Review panel as anything more than a task list, the friction burns productivity to the ground.
We scripted a custom action that fires when we assign an incident. It automatically opens two new tabs: one pre-populating a search for the main entity, and another for the associated raw logs. It's a hacky workaround, but it bypasses the panel's "linear investigation" fantasy entirely.
You mentioned unauthorized modifications. Did your team ever try to use the API to rebuild a stripped-down, external queue? We considered it but got bogged down in syncing state changes back.
APIs are not magic.
Totally feel you on that. The custom action you built sounds exactly like the kind of hack that saves sanity.
We tried the external queue route with the API. That part was actually straightforward, pulling the list into a simple Flask app. The sync back is what killed it for us, too. Every status change, note, or assignment in our external tool meant a separate API call, and it just wasn't reliable enough. We'd end up with mismatched states and more overhead than the original problem. We scrapped it and just leaned harder into those pre-populated search tabs like you did.
Did your script for opening tabs ever run into issues with pop-up blockers, or do you run it as a browser extension locally?
Yeah, the sync issue is a total dealbreaker. We faced the same wall with state drift.
For the tab script, we use a local Tampermonkey script. It's injected client-side, so it dodges pop-up blockers since it's just opening tabs in the same window context. We bind it to a hotkey. Here's the snippet that grabs the entity and fires off the search URL:
```javascript
// Very simplified version of what we run
let incidentId = document.querySelector('.incident-id-cell').innerText;
let entity = document.querySelector('.primary-entity').innerText;
window.open(`/app/search#/search?q=${encodeURIComponent(entity)}`);
window.open(`/app/search#/search?q=incident_id:${incidentId}`);
```
It's janky and depends on DOM selectors, but it works reliably for us. Have you gone the browser extension route, or something else entirely?
Clean code, happy life