The FortiSIEM Overview tab defaults to showing the top impacted hosts by severity.

Which incident tab view in FortiSIEM shows the top impacted hosts by severity by default?

• A. Overview
• B. List
• C. Risk
• D. Alerts

Answer: (A)

The Overview tab in FortiSIEM provides a high-level view that includes essential metrics and visualizations, making it an effective starting point for incident analysis. By default, this tab is designed to summarize the most critical data, including the top impacted hosts organized by severity. This feature allows security analysts to quickly identify the most significant threats or issues that require immediate attention, facilitating a fast and efficient response. In contrast, while the List tab may present details about individual incidents, it does not specifically highlight top impacted hosts by severity as a default view. The Risk tab focuses more on the risk levels associated with different assets rather than providing a summary of impacted hosts. The Alerts tab is tailored to display triggered alerts but lacks the consolidated information regarding host impact severity. Therefore, the Overview tab is the correct choice due to its comprehensive and intuitive design, aimed at delivering quick insights into the most pressing security concerns within the environment.

Let’s start with a simple reality: when a security alert hits, speed and clarity matter. You don’t want to wade through a sea of details to find the real culprits. FortiSIEM is built to help with that, and one of its most useful design decisions sits right in the Incident view: the Overview tab. It’s the kind of starting point that sets the tone for a fast, focused response.

What the Overview actually does

Think of the Overview tab as the dashboard of a security operations center. It gives you a high-level snapshot—bold metrics, clean visuals, and a digestible summary of what’s happening in your environment. By default, it highlights the top impacted hosts by severity. That quick glance tells you where the most urgent issues live, so you know where to aim your attention first.

This default focus isn’t random. It’s deliberate design: you get a compact table or chart that ranks hosts by how badly they’re affected, plus the context you need to decide what to prioritize. You can see if a handful of machines are acting as a choke point, or if the trouble is widespread but less intense across many hosts. Either way, you’re getting actionable clarity in minutes, not hours.

How Overview differs from the other tabs

If Overview is the “heads up display,” the other tabs function like different lenses you can put on the same scene:

• List: This is the granular, incident-by-incident view. It’s great for drilling into individual events, timelines, and details. But it’s easy to miss the bigger picture if you start there first.

• Risk: Here, the focus shifts to risk levels tied to assets, users, or networks. It’s useful for strategic decisions—where are the biggest vulnerabilities—but it doesn’t automatically gather all the top hits by severity in one place.

• Alerts: This tab pulls in the triggers that fired, showing you what generated those alerts. It’s essential for tracking alert provenance, suppression, and correlation, but it doesn’t automatically summarize which hosts are most impacted.

So, while each tab has its own job, Overview is the quickest path to seeing where the most critical impact is concentrated. It’s the starting point that helps you decide where to dig deeper next.

Getting the most from Overview: practical tips

Here are a few practical moves to turn Overview into a powerful ally in daily operations:

• Check the default view, then tailor what you see

Start with the top impacted hosts by severity. If your environment spans multiple sites, you may be able to filter by location or asset group to see a more precise picture. Don’t worry about perfection on day one—adjustments you make now stick as you work, so your view stays relevant as threats evolve.

• Use time windows to spot trends

The real power of a fast view comes when you compare different time ranges. A quick shift from “last 24 hours” to “last 7 days” can reveal whether a spike is a blip or a trend. If you notice a cluster of severe impacts in a short window, that’s a cue to investigate containment and remediation quickly.

• Correlate severity with asset importance

Some hosts will be critical servers or endpoints with high-value data. If the top impacted hosts include such assets, you’ve got an extra incentive to act fast. If the list shows less critical endpoints, you might orient your response differently—still careful, but proportionate to risk.

• Drill down from the overview

The magic happens when you click on a top host or a high-severity item. FortiSIEM lets you jump from a summary to detailed incident data, timelines, and related events. It’s like moving from a map to the factory floor in one click.

• Leverage visual cues

Line charts, heat maps, and severity color-coding aren’t just pretty features. They’re quick indicators of where to focus. A red-hot cluster on the overview often means a single root cause or a correlated event across several hosts.

• Export or pin what you need

If you work with teammates, exporting the view or pinning a specific chart to a dashboard can save time. It keeps the essentials visible for on-call rotations or handoffs to incident response teams.

A practical scenario: you’re in a SOC day

Let me paint a quick picture. It’s a busy shift, and you open FortiSIEM to the Incident view. The Overview shows a cluster of red on a handful of hosts in the data center. The top impacted hosts by severity are all those critical services that run your core business apps. You’re not overwhelmed by raw data—you’re oriented by what matters most.

You click into one of the hosts. Suddenly you have a timeline of events: failed authentications, unusual spikes in traffic, and a spike in CPU that correlates with a specific application component. You pivot to the List tab to review the incidents, but you already know where to focus because the Overview highlighted the worst offenders first. Next, you pull up the Alerts to see which triggers fired and when, then switch to Risk to confirm whether these hosts sit in a high-risk asset group.

The flow feels natural. You’re not triaging in a vacuum; you’re following a guided path from a high-level alert to concrete actions, with all the context you need at each step.

Common traps and how to avoid them

No system is perfect, and dashboards can tempt you into over-reliance on a single view. A few pitfalls to watch for:

• Treating Overview as the whole story

Overview is the starting point, not the entire narrative. Always drill down to incidents and logs when something looks off. The top impacted hosts by severity are a pointer, not a verdict.

• Ignoring filters and scope

If you’re analyzing a sprawling environment, a global view can be misleading. Use filters for site, asset type, or time window to keep your focus sharp.

• Over-fine-tuning without validation

It’s easy to want to customize the view endlessly. Start with practical, repeatable filters. Validate changes by checking whether the results align with your security posture and incident response playbooks.

• Letting color cues substitute for analysis

Color coding is helpful, but don’t assume red means “the worst.” Read the underlying data—context matters for accuracy and speed.

How this ties into broader Fortinet topics

If you’re studying Fortinet’s NRE/NTC-style content, the way you use FortiSIEM’s Overview reflects broader security operations principles:

• Observability: capturing a clear, high-level snapshot that guides deeper investigation.

• Prioritization: recognizing where severity and asset importance intersect to drive quick, sound decisions.

• Incident response integration: linking overview insights to incident details, alert provenance, and risk context.

In practice, this means you’re building a workflow that pairs fast recognition with precise triage. It’s about turning a flood of data into a focused action plan, with the Overview tab acting as your compass.

A few lines you can remember

• The Overview tab is the go-to starting point for incident analysis because it highlights the top impacted hosts by severity by default.

• Other tabs—List, Risk, and Alerts—serve complementary roles: from granular incident details to asset risk and alert provenance.

• The real power comes from using Overview as a springboard: quick glance, then immediate drill-down to the root cause.

Closing thoughts: why this matters in the real world

Security isn’t about chasing every single alert. It’s about staying a step ahead by prioritizing what matters most and acting with clarity. The Overview tab in FortiSIEM helps you do just that—give you a credible snapshot of the environment, point you toward the most urgent issues, and keep you moving toward containment and remediation without getting bogged down.

If you’re exploring FortiSIEM in your day-to-day work, keep this mindset: start with a strong, strategic view, then follow the thread from top severity to the specifics you need to fix. It’s a balance between speed and precision, the kind of balance that separates good responders from great ones.

And hey, if you ever feel the flow stalling, take a breath, scan the top impacted hosts by severity, and ask: which host, or which service, is the real chokepoint here? More often than not, that simple question is the key to a faster, cleaner resolution. FortiSIEM makes that question easy to answer, and that’s exactly the kind of clarity every security team needs.