The Applied Watch Dashboard is the Graphical User Interface (GUI) to the entire Applied Watch Command Center infrastructure. Users are able to manage, monitor, and respond to threats detected by remote Snort® IDS sensors managed by the Applied Watch Agent. The Applied Watch Dashboard is written entirely in Java giving the user flexible deployment options across any Operating System that supports the Java Runtime Environment (JRE). This includes Mac, Unix, Linux, and Windows.
The Applied Watch Dashboard offers real-time monitoring of alerts that are sent in from disparate Applied Watch Agents monitoring Snort®, allowing the user to take decisive action on threats to the network. Through a polished user interface that provides an enterprise facelift to open source security applications such as Snort®, organizations no longer have to use multiple scripts and web interfaces to managing their Snort® sensors.
The Applied Watch Dashboard exercises real-time alert monitoring capabilities that competing browser-based solutions are unable to match. As a robust Java-based application, the Dashboard can be installed on virtually any Operating System that supports JRE.
The main alert view offers sortable columns in the real-time alert tables for filtering out events of interest. When double-clicking on an alert, the user is presented an aggregated alert view of every event for that Snort® Signature ID (SID), which is how the event data is aggregated. The user has the option to dissect an event further by reviewing the entire packet dump from layer 1 to 7 in both HEX and ASCII.
Unique to the Applied Watch Command Center is the most powerful tool for creating, managing, and assigning rulesets to remote Snort® sensors. The Applied Watch Dashboard's Policy Manager provides a graphical interface to the unattended downloading and updating of new Snort® rules from snort.org, bleedingedge, and offline media. The Policy Manager allows everyone from the most novice Snort® user to to the more experienced to quickly and easily create new Snort® rules in seconds that previously could take much longer depending on the user's understanding of the Snort® rule language.
The Dashboard Policy Manager offers tools not previously available to Snort® users, such as a policy backup and restore system, a Wizard-driven interface for validating Snort® rules, graphical interfaces to managing the snort.conf file, and a browser tab for researching Snort® signature references.