How to Build a Custom Dashboard in ThreatHawk for Your SOC

Why Custom Dashboards Matter for SOC Operations

Standard SIEM dashboards often fail because they try to serve everyone at once. A security operations center monitoring hundreds of thousands of events per second cannot afford visual noise. When an analyst opens a dashboard, every widget should answer a specific operational question: Are we seeing authentication failures above baseline? Did any endpoint trigger a known-bad IOC in the last hour? Are we compliant with SOC 2 CC6.1 log monitoring requirements?

Custom dashboards in ThreatHawk solve this by letting you surface only the data relevant to your current mission. The platform's underlying log correlation engine and behavioral analytics (UEBA) feed into widgets that you configure with precise filters, time ranges, and aggregation logic. This transforms dashboards from passive reporting tools into active decision-support systems.

Before You Begin: Data Sources and Role Planning

A custom dashboard is only as valuable as the data feeding it. Before you build your first widget, complete these two planning steps.

Assess Your Current Data Ingestion

ThreatHawk ingests logs from a wide range of sources — cloud platforms (AWS CloudTrail, Azure Activity Logs, GCP Audit Logs), on-premises infrastructure (Windows Event Log, Syslog, Cisco ASA), endpoints (EDR telemetry via API), and SaaS applications (Office 365, Slack, Salesforce). The SIEM examples page on CyberSilo's site provides real-world ingestion patterns for each source type. Review which log sources are actively streaming into your ThreatHawk instance, because a dashboard widget pulling from a dormant connector will show stale or empty data.

Define SOC Role-Based Views

Map each dashboard to a specific consumer. Here is a recommended role-based framework:

Step-by-Step Guide to Building a Custom Dashboard in ThreatHawk

ThreatHawk's dashboard builder is designed for both novice analysts and power users. The following process walks you through creating a production-grade SOC dashboard from scratch.

Building a Compliance-Ready Dashboard for PCI DSS and HIPAA

Compliance teams often struggle to prove continuous monitoring coverage during audits. ThreatHawk addresses this with dashboards purpose-built for regulatory frameworks. For example, a PCI DSS Requirement 10 dashboard (track and monitor all access to cardholder data) would include widgets for log generation coverage across all CDE systems, failed access attempts, privilege escalation events, and log retention status. Similarly, a HIPAA Security Rule dashboard would focus on authentication anomalies, data access by unauthorized IPs, and encryption status events.

ThreatHawk's Compliance Standards Automation solution integrates directly with these dashboards, automatically mapping ingested log data to specific compliance controls. When you build a custom compliance dashboard, you can pull from these pre-mapped control tags rather than manually writing queries for each widget. This reduces setup time from hours to minutes and ensures that your audit evidence is always aligned with the latest framework version.

Advanced Dashboard Techniques: UEBA and Behavioral Analytics Views

ThreatHawk's built-in User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) engine generates risk scores and anomaly flags based on deviations from established baselines. To surface this intelligence effectively, build a dedicated UEBA dashboard with these widgets:

• Risk Score Distribution: A bar chart showing the number of users/entities at each risk tier (low, medium, high, critical). This gives a quick pulse on overall exposure.
• Anomaly Timeline: A line chart overlaid with threshold markers, displaying how many anomalies were detected per hour. Spikes here often correlate with active threat actor activity.
• Top Risky Users Table: A data table sorted by highest risk score, showing username, department, number of anomalous events, and last threat intelligence hit. This is actionable intelligence for Tier 2 investigation — analysts can click directly into the user entity page from the table.
• Geographic Anomaly Map: A map widget plotting login attempts from unusual geographic locations, sized by the number of events. Threats such as credential stuffing often generate geographically dispersed traffic that is immediately visible on this widget.

UEBA dashboards benefit from longer time ranges (7–30 days) to establish meaningful baselines, while the anomaly timeline widget should use a shorter window (last 24 hours) for real-time responsiveness. ThreatHawk's next-gen SIEM architecture allows these contrasting time ranges to coexist on the same dashboard without performance degradation.

Integrating Threat Intelligence Feeds into Your Dashboard

A dashboards ability to correlate internal events with external threat intelligence is a hallmark of modern SOC operations. ThreatHawk supports integration with TAXII/STIX feeds and the ThreatSearch TIP platform. To incorporate threat intelligence into your custom dashboard:

1. Configure your threat intelligence connector under Integrations > Threat Intelligence Feeds.
2. Build a widget that queries for events matching known IOCs (IP addresses, domains, file hashes) from the feed.
3. Use a data table widget to display the matched events alongside the threat Intel context (feed name, confidence score, associated malware family).
4. Add a number tile showing the "Total Match Count" for the current shift — this gives analysts an immediate priority signal.

This integration is particularly valuable for organizations subject to NIST 800-53 controls like SI-4 (System Monitoring) and IR-4 (Incident Handling), which require near-real-time correlation of internal events with external threat information. Organizations using ThreatHawk's SIEM tools that integrate with EDR and XDR can extend this further by pulling endpoint detection telemetry into the same dashboard, creating a unified view of network-wide threat activity.

Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

Even experienced SOC teams make mistakes when designing custom SIEM dashboards. Here are the most common issues and how ThreatHawk's architecture helps you avoid them:

Overloading with Too Many Widgets

A dashboard with 20+ widgets creates cognitive overload. Analysts cannot prioritize what to investigate. ThreatHawk's best practice is to limit dashboards to 6–9 widgets for operational use and 12–15 for executive summaries. Use number tiles for high-level KPIs and data tables for drill-down investigation — avoid duplicate representations of the same metric.

Ignoring Query Performance

Widgets that query raw, unaggregated data across millions of events can cause slow load times. ThreatHawk includes a query performance indicator that shows estimated execution time before you save a widget. If a query is flagged as high-cost, consider using a time-based aggregation (e.g., stats count by _time span=1h) or restricting the query to indexed fields rather than free-text searches.

Failure to Document Dashboard Purpose

Without clear documentation, a dashboard created by one analyst may be incomprehensible to another. ThreatHawk allows you to add a description field to each dashboard. Use it to state the dashboard's intended audience, primary use case, and any widgets that depend on specific data sources running. This simple step prevents confusion during shift handoffs and audits.

SOC Metrics That Should Be on Every Custom Dashboard

Regardless of your industry or compliance framework, certain metrics provide foundational visibility. Consider including these on your primary SOC dashboard: