• SOC analysts face overwhelming alert volumes, steep learning curves, and collaboration challenges daily, slowing investigations and fueling burnout.
• While traditional process trees offer useful information, they fall short against today’s complex mountain of data and alerts.
• Smarter visualization with unified views, real-time queries, and clear logs speed investigations and strengthens compliance and collaboration across the SOC. 

The cybersecurity industry has been crying out in support of its Security Operations Center (SOC) teams—understaffed, overloaded with noise, buried under reports, and pulled in way too many directions. One study found that roughly half of all security teams are overwhelmed by alert volume and unable to solve 49% of alerts assigned to them. 

Facing a steep learning curve that tests their mettle every workday, junior analysts often struggle to connect dots across sprawling datasets, while senior analysts are stretched thin between mentoring their juniors and handling more challenging investigations. And when teams lean on new tools to lighten their load, it often creates more work. Pivoting suddenly requires multiple tabs and proving value to management feels like yet another complex task. 

Entire SOC teams are sleep deprived and ground down like a police detective pulling a double shift, juggling too many disconnected pieces of evidence connected by what seems like miles of red string. But what if investigations didn’t have to look like Pepe Silvia conspiracy boards? 

What analysts need isn’t more string; they need a way to see the whole picture at once.

Why traditional visualization alone isn’t enough

Process trees have long been a familiar friend of Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR). While useful for tracing parent-child process relationships, they often don’t tell the whole story. 

At triage, a single tree leaves too many questions unanswered: 

• Context is limited. You can only see what spawned what, not broader relationships or if those relationships matter in the bigger picture.
• Visibility stops at one device. Is this happening elsewhere in the environment, or is it a one-off? You don’t know.
• Focus is too narrow. Not all attacks are process-driven. What if there’s a suspicious IP connection, registry change, or lateral movement? Again, you can’t see it.
• Pivoting is a pain. Following a hunch means opening new tabs, writing fresh queries, and repeating searches—things nobody wants to do. 

For junior analysts, these limits are especially tough. Everyone starts somewhere, but facing massive datasets without context or the right tools can make it harder to grow and piles even more work on analysts. Collaboration starts to break down when handoffs are incomplete, slowing remediation. 

These gaps in context and visualization might seem small, but they add up and soon enough analysts are dropping like flies from burnout. 

4 visualization capabilities you want in your toolkit

The reality is SOC teams need to go beyond process trees—without getting locked into yet another silo or losing the clues and space they need to pivot and chase down threats. 

Four capabilities stand out when we think about the problems your team faces every day: 

1. A single, unified view 

Investigations should bring the whole gang together—processes, users, devices, IPs, domains, registry keys, etc.—into one workspace. That means analysts need a central “workdesk” to investigate relationships, not 15 different tabs. 

2. Real-time queries 

Building complex searches from scratch wastes time, especially when you’re just trying to answer basic questions like, “Has this hash been seen on other endpoints?" or “Which devices communicated with this IP?” Investigations can move way faster if queries could run instantly on that very same window. 

3. A visual and written track record

Automation is a SOC team's best friend. Every every step of an investigation should get logged automatically—with the option to add comments and contexts. This will deliver transparency across the whole team, add a built-in handoff mechanism and make sure nothing gets lost in the daily shuffle. 

4. Pruning for clarity 

More data isn’t always better. Analysts need the ability to remove irrelevant nodes from view while keeping the underlying activity log. That way the graph stays readable, but nothing was actually lost—crucial in case a colleague wants to revisit that very path later. 

The more you see, the more precise your remediation

When you’ve got capabilities like these helping with investigations, wrestling with data (or red strings) becomes a thing of the past. Analysts get a near complete visualization of everything happening in their system without leaving the tab, unlocking avenues for strategic remediation, without tipping off the bad guys. 

And that same clarity that keeps triage fast also ensures the business can prove exactly how those incidents were handled—with built-in records of every step offering robust evidence for reports, audits, and compliance reviews. Within minutes, organization-wide investigations get cracked wide open and context becomes tangible leverage for precision containment and remediation. 

Even the best tools can’t replace good investigative habits

Some of these might come naturally, but it’s a common SOC experience that not everyone might have the same way of doing things. Without collaboration, innovation and learning vanish into thin air. And often, it comes down to the little things, like how we might implement a new solution. 

These quick best practices can make your investigations go down a whole lot smoother:

• Enhance readability by rearranging or pruning nodes to reduce clutter.
• Focus on relevant data to streamline analysis and highlight the real anomaly.
• Name graphs consistently, making it easier for future-you to know what’s in the file.
• Document decisions with comments to explain any pivots, deletions, or external lookups.
• Explore multiple angles, pivoting between processes and assets for a wider, more comprehensive perspective. 

Rather than call 911, equip your SOC teammates with the right tools

There’s no reason why alerts should haunt your analysts. With Threat Tracer, a feature of Carbon Black Enterprise EDR, analysts can quickly consolidate evidence, collaborate, and remediate all with clear records of what’s been done, future-proofing investigations and taking the stress out of audits and reports. 

With Threat Tracer, the payoff is threefold. You can:

• Accelerate investigations. Instant queries, cleaner views instead of traditional process trees, and the ability to prune irrelevant noise helps analysts focus on the right data.
• Streamline collaboration. Saved annotations and activity logs let teammates pick up exactly where others left off—no duplicated work or retracted steps.
• Strengthen compliance. Documented decisions, pivots, and actions automatically create a transparent, auditable trail of activity. 

Built right into Carbon Black Cloud Enterprise EDR, Threat Tracer offers a relationship-based view that goes far beyond traditional process trees. Able to map out connections between devices, users, processes, files (you name it), analysts get the context they need to spot hidden patterns and unmask the perpetrators.  

Watch the webinar, How To Cut Through the Noise & Launch Smarter Attack Chain Investigations, for a live demonstration of exactly how Threat Tracer helps SOC teams shake false alerts and solve investigations faster.