Last updated at Wed, 30 Aug 2017 15:20:24 GMT

While ControlsInsight looks at your current defense and provides suggested steps for the future, it's also important to look at your past assessment history to see whether you're making progress (hopefully the answer is yes). We recently added historical trending data to both the UI and API, which allows you to see your entire assessment history down to the day.


New Interactive Charts

We have added two types of interactive charts that display trending. The chart on the Threats page, in the Status tab, displays your security grade in blue and the total number of assets in green. To learn more about grades in ControlsInsight, see Understanding Security Control Grades.

With this chart, you can get quickly see if you are trending positively as the number of assets changes. For example, you can see whether any grade decreases are due to adding new uncovered assets to your network. You can also drill down into each security control for a trending chart that breaks down the applicable assets into covered and uncovered, with the covered percentage in blue.


How to Use the Charts

By default, the charts display your entire assessment history. You can narrow down the displayed data to certain date ranges in three different ways:

  • Select a predefined date range in the top left (1 month, 3 months, etc.) and use the scroll bar to move the range around.
  • Use the navigator below to drag the left and right actors to modify the range, and use the scroll bar to move the range around.
  • Pick an exact date using the date range in the top right, either by clicking through the calendar or typing in a specific date.

The left x axis displays the grade or the coverage, while the right x axis displays the number of assets. The bottom y axis displays the date of each assessment down to the day. The navigator below the chart displays the entire data set (grade or coverage) and you can toggle the data by clicking on the legend items below the chart.

Trending API

With the open API, you can use the trending data to create your own charts or export the data to a different format. The new endpoints are:

  • /configurations/{configuration}/trend
  • /threats/{threat}/trend
  • /threat_vectors/{threat_vector}/trend

To learn how to use the API, see Leveraging the ControlsInsight REST API v1.0.

The objective of the trending data and charts are to provide you with an easy to understand view of how your defense is changing over time. Obviously your goal is to see positive trends (and you can use the next steps in ControlsInsight to get there), either in terms of your grade or your coverage. However, if there are negative trends, the charts make it easy to pinpoint when they happened to help you to determine the cause.