> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://cortex-docs.paloaltonetworks.com/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://cortex-docs.paloaltonetworks.com/cortex-xdr-3.x/cortex-xdr-3.x-documentation/investigate-and-respond-to-incidents/investigate-alerts.md).

# Investigate alerts

Alerts help you to monitor and control the security of your system framework by alerting you to security risks in your framework. Cortex XDR generates alerts from the following:

* Rules that you set up, such as BIOC, IOC, correlation rules, etc.
* Agents
* Firewalls
* Analytics
* Integrations

  Integrations enable you to ingest events, such as phishing emails, SIEM events, from third party security and management vendors. You might need to configure the integrations to determine how events are classified as events. For example, for email integrations, you might want to classify items based on the subject field, but for SIEM events, you want to  classify by event type.


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