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Incident correlation

Escalated alerts rarely arrive alone: a brute-force burst, a lateral-move chain, or a noisy misconfiguration produces dozens of related escalations. The incident layer turns them into one reviewable object.

From escalation to incident

  1. Grouping. Escalated alerts are keyed by what they have in common — the environment, the entities involved, and the time window — and either join an existing open incident or open a new one.
  2. L2 review. A deeper analysis pass reads the incident as a whole: it can consolidate, re-score, summarize the story so far, and flag what deserves human eyes first.
  3. Lifecycle. Incidents carry a status (open → in review → resolved), accumulate member alerts as the situation evolves, and keep the complete decision trail of every member.

When an incident opens

Correlation runs automatically right after every triage pass — there is no button to press. It reads the freshly triaged alerts, groups them per agent, and opens an incident when any of three signals fire in the window:

  • two or more distinct MITRE tactics on one agent — coordinated activity, not a repeated rule;
  • three or more alerts at high or urgent priority;
  • a single urgent-priority alert — so a lone critical from a source that lacks MITRE tagging still opens one.

An agent's existing incident is updated in place instead of creating duplicates.

What you see in the console

The incidents view is designed to be the first screen an analyst opens:

  • Incidents ranked by risk, each with a summary, its member alerts, and the MITRE techniques involved.
  • The timeline of how the incident grew — which alert opened it, what joined, what L2 concluded.
  • Actions: resolve, keep watching, or trigger incident response.

An incident is described by four independent values — evidence verdict, severity, evidence strength, and response priority — and reaching a confirmed verdict takes hands-on verification. How to read all of that: Reading an incident.

Why correlation matters

Without it, an agentic SOC would just move alert fatigue one step downstream — a hundred escalations instead of a thousand alerts. Correlation is what makes the output fewer, better objects rather than slightly filtered noise.