How can I build a report to show the total count of a specific event over time. All of my timecharts are showing spikes over the time range but not accruing the number throughout.
I am not sure what you mean by "accruing the number throughout". It would be helpful to see your actual search.
If you want a timechart that counts events, you can do this
yoursearchhere | timechart count
If you want to specify the time interval you can do this
yoursearchhere | timechart count span=1h
If you want to see the count as an ever-increasing number, I guess you could do this
yoursearchhere
| timechart count as hourlyCount span=1h
| streamstats sum(hourlyCount) as count