Case ManagerCase Manager Documentation

An artifact is the additional evidence you discover as you investigate. There are five artifact types: email address, file, IP, process, and URL. Artifacts are timestamped. You create an artifact manually, or automatically through an action. Although not all artifacts are important to your investigation, you add it to the incident to record it just in case.

While entities and artifacts are both objects, they are different when you look at them in context and the different roles they play in your investigation. An artifact is an object you collect when you investigate an incident, like evidence the police find when investigating a crime. An entity is what the artifact supports or describes; it is the crime the police investigates. An artifact enriches an entity.

An item can't be both an entity and an artifact. However, in specific cases, something might appear under both the Artifact and Entities sections in an incident. For example: a malicious file is an entity, but its contents are artifacts.