Advanced visualisation: seaborn, Plotly and dashboards
You make security data explorable with statistical charts in seaborn, interactive visuals in Plotly and a small dashboard app.
Level 301 · 18 lessons · 15 practice labs
Lessons
Statistical charts
- Introduction to seaborn: data-first plotting
- Distribution plots: KDE, violin, ECDF
- Relational plots and small multiples
- Heatmaps and clustered heatmaps
- Quick task: login hours by country
Interactive
- Interactive charts with Plotly Express
- Hover, zoom and filter
- Incident timelines
- Showing connections as a graph
- Quick task: an interactive attack timeline
Dashboard
- Dashboard design: questions, layout, priority
- A dashboard app with Streamlit
- Filters and state
- Dashboard performance and caching
- Publishing dashboards safely: access and data leaks
- Quick task: an alert triage dashboard
Review
- Reviewing a dashboard with its users
- Capstone: a SOC shift dashboard
Practice labs
- Show a distribution with a KDE: Draw two offices' session lengths as overlaid KDE plots with seaborn and state the difference in the title.
- Comparing with violin and ECDF plots: Plot five applications' response times as violin and ECDF plots and mark the one with the worst 95th percentile.
- Comparing regions with small multiples: Plot eight regions' hourly login patterns as small multiples with shared axes and highlight the region whose pattern stands apart.
- A correlation heatmap: Draw the correlation matrix of session features as an annotated heatmap and write down the most strongly related pair.
- Behaviour groups in a clustered heatmap: Draw a user×application usage matrix as a clustered heatmap and name the groups of users that behave alike.
- The scale changes the story: Redraw a heatmap where one cell drowns everything on a linear colour scale using a log scale and explain the pattern that appears.
- An interactive line chart: Plot daily alert counts with Plotly Express, add a hover box showing the type breakdown and save it as HTML.
- An incident timeline: Draw the steps of an intrusion as an interactive timeline coloured by host.
- Show connections as a network graph: Draw the connections between internal hosts as a network graph and make the most connected node stand out by size and colour.
- A one-page Streamlit dashboard: Build a three-component Streamlit dashboard from an alert CSV showing the total, type breakdown and daily trend.
- Filters and state: Add date-range and severity filters to the dashboard and show every component updates with the selection.
- Speed up a slow dashboard with caching: Speed up a dashboard that re-reads the file on every click with caching and measure the difference in load time.
- Lay out a dashboard from questions: Put a shift team's five questions in priority order and write the component and layout plan for each to layout.md.
- Find the data leak in a dashboard: Find the personal data shown in a raw table and the downloadable full data set on a public dashboard and fix it to show summaries only.
- Redesign from user feedback: Extract three usability problems from analysts' written feedback, rearrange the dashboard accordingly and hand it in with the changes documented.
About this course
You make security data explorable with statistical charts in seaborn, interactive visuals in Plotly and a small dashboard app.
What you will learn
- Statistical charts
- Interactive
- Dashboard
- Review
Prerequisites
You should be comfortable with the level 101 and 201 topics of the same path.
Lab environment
Lessons run on your own Kali Linux desktop in the browser, with the tools ready in their windowed interfaces. Nothing to install; a computer screen is recommended.
Frequently asked questions
- Is this course right for my level?
- The course is at level 301; it assumes you know the topics of the lower-level courses.
- Is there anything to install?
- No. Every lesson runs in your own lab environment that opens in the browser.
- How do lessons work?
- Each lesson has 8 to 10 steps and a short quiz. Early steps show the command to type, later steps give less help; if two attempts fail, the solution opens.
- Can I try it for free?
- Yes. The first three lessons of every course are free.