FortiSIEM uses four incident categories—Performance, Availability, Security, and Change—to guide IT monitoring.

What are the four categories of incidents recognized in FortiSIEM?

• A. Performance, Availability, Security, Change
• B. Devices, Users, High Risk, Low Risk
• C. Critical, Minor, Major, Warning
• D. Threat, Vulnerability, Exposure, Incident

Answer: (A)

The four categories of incidents recognized in FortiSIEM—Performance, Availability, Security, and Change—focus on comprehensive monitoring and analysis of an organization's IT environment. This categorization helps in identifying and managing incidents in an organized manner. Performance incidents relate to the functionality and efficiency of IT resources, ensuring that systems operate optimally. Availability incidents revolve around the uptime and accessibility of services, which is crucial for business continuity. Security incidents are focused on threats and breaches that can compromise data and network integrity. Finally, Change incidents address modifications in the environment, such as configuration changes or updates, which can impact system operations. By categorizing incidents this way, FortiSIEM allows for effective incident management and response, enabling security teams to prioritize and remedy issues based on their nature and impact on the business. This structured approach is vital for maintaining the overall health of an organization's IT infrastructure.

Let’s level-set on incident management the way a good playlist sets the vibe for a long commute. When alerts start piling up, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. But if you think in four neat buckets—Performance, Availability, Security, and Change—things suddenly become clearer. FortiSIEM recognizes incidents in exactly these four categories, and that clarity helps speed up detection, triage, and response. Here’s a practical tour of what each bucket means and how to use it in everyday security operations.

The big four: Performance, Availability, Security, Change

• Performance

• Availability

• Security

• Change

Now, let’s unpack what each one covers and why it matters in real life, not just on a test sheet.

Performance: when speed slows you down

Performance incidents are all about how well the IT stack does its job. It isn’t just about a single slow page; it’s about response times, throughput, CPU usage, memory leaks, and database latency that creep up and start to impact users. Think about a customer relationship system that starts lagging during peak hours, or a file-transfer service that coughs when lots of people are uploading at once. In FortiSIEM terms, you’re watching for anomalies in performance metrics—latency spikes, dropped requests, bottlenecks in the chain from app server to database to storage.

Why this matters in daily practice: performance problems usually signal something more systemic, like a misconfigured service, insufficient resources, or a poorly optimized workflow. Catching these early keeps user experience smooth and helps avoid the “frustration cascade”—the moment when one slow service drags others down.

A practical tip: pair performance dashboards with service-level indicators (SLIs) tied to actual business outcomes. If you’re using FortiSIEM, map those SLIs to specific IT services so you can see which service isn’t meeting the mark and drill into the root cause without chasing noise.

Availability: uptime is the lifeblood

Availability incidents are all about being reachable and usable. Even the most feature-rich system is useless if it’s offline or unresponsive. FortiSIEM flags outages, failed sensor checks, switch or router downtime, and service unavailability across the network, data centers, and cloud footprints. It’s the classic “the service is down” signal, but with a modern twist: you’re looking for correlated indicators—multiple components failing in concert or a service that’s intermittently up and down.

Why this matters in daily practice: downtime translates directly to lost productivity, unhappy customers, and real business impact. Availability isn’t glamorous, but it’s foundational. When you can demonstrate that a service has high uptime and quick recovery times, you’re delivering reliability as a feature.

A practical tip: build availability dashboards around business services and ensure you have automated health checks. FortiSIEM can correlate sensor data, network heartbeats, and application pings to present a clear outage picture rather than a flood of scattered alerts.

Security: guarding the castle

Security incidents cover threats, breaches, and anomalies that put data integrity, privacy, or system integrity at risk. Think malware detections, unauthorized access attempts, anomalous login patterns, privilege escalations, suspicious file activity, or attempts to reach restricted resources. In FortiSIEM, you’re hunting for signs of intrusion, policy violations, and unusual behavior that could indicate a breach or data leakage.

Why this matters in daily practice: attackers don’t shout when they’ve arrived. They whisper through small anomalies—odd login times, unusual data transfers, or a sudden spike in failed authentications. Early detection, quick containment, and solid forensics are everything here. A strong security posture relies on recognizing patterns and patterns changing shape under pressure.

A practical tip: don’t treat security events as one-off alerts. Create a hierarchy where security incidents are prioritized by potential impact and likelihood. Use threat intelligence feeds alongside internal signals to validate whether something is a real threat or a harmless anomaly.

Change: configurations and the drift that follows

Change incidents focus on modifications in the environment—config changes, software updates, policy tweaks, or infrastructure alterations. The catch here is that changes can be benign, but they can also introduce risk if they’re not properly planned or tested. FortiSIEM helps you spot when changes occur, how they propagate, and whether they correlate with new incidents, performance shifts, or outages.

Why this matters in daily practice: human error and misconfigurations are common roots of bigger problems. By tracking changes, you can separate “what happened” from “why it happened,” making root-cause analysis far more reliable. Change management isn’t about stopping all changes; it’s about knowing when a change might ripple into service degradation or new vulnerabilities.

A practical tip: pair change events with a change advisory board workflow, and tag changes with business risk levels. When FortiSIEM flags a modification, you can quickly assess whether rollback or additional testing is warranted before it affects users.

Putting the four categories to work in FortiSIEM

• Start with service-based thinking. Map each IT service to the four categories so you can see where a problem lives at a glance. If a service is down, is it a Availability issue? Is it tied to a recent change? Or is it a security event that needs containment? This cross-check helps avoid chasing the wrong rabbit.

• Build category-specific dashboards. A clean, focused view for Performance, Availability, Security, and Change reduces alert fatigue and speeds triage. It also makes trending easier: are performance issues spreading across multiple services, or are security incidents increasing at night?

• Use correlation rules intelligently. FortiSIEM excels at linking disparate alerts into a cohesive incident. When a performance spike coincides with a sudden change, you can explore root causes more quickly. When multiple security signals show up together, you’ve got a stronger case for containment.

• Integrate with asset and service maps. Knowing which devices, apps, and users are in play helps you understand category impact. A change in a critical server cluster will look different from a routine update on a development environment.

• Prioritize responses. Not all incidents demand the same level of urgency. A performance dip that affects a single non-critical service can be handled differently from a security breach that touches sensitive data. The four-category framework gives you a natural rubric to guide action.

A practical scenario to clarify how the four categories play out

Imagine a mid-size enterprise where a popular internal collaboration tool starts responding slowly during peak hours. You see:

• A Performance alert on the application tier with higher latency and increased CPU usage on the app server.

• An Availability signal showing intermittent service availability in one data center.

• No obvious security anomaly yet, but user access logs show unusual access patterns from a single region.

• A recent change event: a configuration tweak to the load balancer that shifted traffic patterns.

Here’s how the four categories guide your next steps:

• Start with Performance: confirm the latency anomaly is linked to the app server and check resource utilization. If it’s a ramp-up issue, you might adjust scaling policies or tune the database query.

• Check Availability: verify whether the data center issue is broader (network path, upstream provider) or isolated. If the service remains accessible from other locations, you may segment traffic and keep users informed.

• Scan Security signals: the odd regional access is a red flag worth closer look, even if no breach is confirmed yet. Run a quick correlation to see if this pattern aligns with any known threat intel.

• Review Change history: inspect the recent load balancer tweak. If the change correlates with the traffic shift, you may decide to roll back temporarily while you assess impact.

This cross-check flow helps you triage faster and preserve service continuity while reducing risk.

Why this structured approach helps in the long run

• It clarifies priorities. When alerts pile up, knowing whether the issue is performance, availability, security, or change-related helps you allocate time and resources where they matter most.

• It improves incident response consistency. Teams learn to respond the same way to similar categories, reducing confusion and improving collaboration.

• It supports better post-incident analysis. With clear category labels, you can trace root causes across multiple incidents and identify recurring patterns—like frequent changes triggering outages, or latency spikes preceding security events.

• It aligns with real-world operations. The four-category lens mirrors how modern IT environments are built: fast and responsive services, always-on availability, hardened security, and well-governed changes.

A few thoughtful touches you can add to your toolkit

• Don’t chase every alert. Use the four categories as a filter, not a micromanagement tool. Let the categories guide triage, then verify with deeper data.

• Keep it human. Automated signals are essential, but so is context from people who know the environment. Encourage your team to annotate incidents with what happened, when, and what was observed—these notes pay off later in forensics.

• Embrace learning. Every incident is a chance to improve. After containing an event, review how the four-category framework helped. Where did it shine? Where could it use tightening?

Wrapping it up: a practical mental model

FortiSIEM’s four-category framework—Performance, Availability, Security, Change—gives you a simple, effective mental model for incident management. It’s a way to cut through noise, prioritize actions, and learn from every incident you handle. The goal isn’t to memorize a list but to adopt a reliable approach that helps you keep services healthy, protect data, and stay in control when the environment gets chaotic.

If you’re exploring FortiSIEM and incident workflows, start by mapping your most critical services to these four categories. Build clean dashboards for each category, set up thoughtful correlation rules, and routinely review change events for potential risk. With this foundation, you’ll move from reactive firefighting to purposeful, confident operation—even when alerts come at you from every direction.

Final takeaways

• The four categories FortiSIEM uses are Performance, Availability, Security, and Change.

• Each category covers a distinct facet of the IT environment, helping you triage and respond more efficiently.

• A practical, service-centered approach—combined with smart dashboards and correlation—makes incidents more actionable and less overwhelming.

• Treat incidents as learning opportunities: continuously refine mappings, rules, and workflows to keep the environment resilient.

If you’re curious to deepen your understanding, look into real-world FortiSIEM cases and how teams use category-based thinking to streamline incident handling. The framework is simple, but the impact can be profoundly practical—making your day-to-day security operations less chaotic and more deliberate.