Best practices to optimize incident handling

You can't determine what's abnormal if you don't know what's normal. In other words, if a user opens a new incident saying that the server's performance is slow, you must know all the variables before you jump to a conclusion. To know if the server is slow, you must first know what's considered to be a normal speed. This also applies to networks, appliances, and other devices. To mitigate scenarios like this, make sure you have the following in place:

• System profile
• Network profile/baseline
• Log-retention policy
• Clock synchronization across all systems

Based on this, you will be able to establish what's normal across all systems and networks. This will be very useful when an incident occurs and you need to determine what's normal before starting to troubleshoot the issue from a security perspective.