Effective detection engineering requires balancing thorough threat coverage with manageable alert volumes. Without insight into how many alerts a detection generates, you might create rules that either miss real threats or inundate you with excessive alert noise. By testing and previewing the number of alerts such as findings and intermediate findings, generated by the detection directly in the editor, you can immediately assess the potential impact of the detection. This visibility helps to ensure that new detections deliver actionable, high-quality signals, thereby improving detection quality, reducing false positives, and preventing analyst overload before the detection is ever deployed into the SOC workflow.

You can use the Test panel in the Detection editor of Splunk Enterprise Security to review, test, and predict the volume of search results before turning on your detection. The ability to test detections lets you validate detection performance and fine-tune your rules based on your data, without manually leveraging Search and Reporting feature for testing. For example, you can run your detection over the past 24 hours to see if the number of findings aligns with your expectations, such as the expected 50 findings versus an excessive number of 100,000 findings.

Note that the time range and detection frequency significantly impacts these estimates. The value specified in the Earliest time and the detection's cron schedule settings directly impact the average estimated number of outputs per day, especially if there is overlapping data across the detection schedules.

The following figure provides sample test results to validate a detection. The figure displays estimated outputs from the detection based on the calculated average output which depends on the detection frequency across a specified time range.