Splunk 7 Essentials, Third Edition

By : J-P Contreras, Steven Koelpin, Erickson Delgado, Betsy Page Sigman

4 (10)

Buy this Book

Splunk 7 Essentials, Third Edition

4 (10)

By: J-P Contreras, Steven Koelpin, Erickson Delgado, Betsy Page Sigman

Buy this Book

Overview of this book

Splunk is a search, reporting, and analytics software platform for machine data, which has an ever-growing market adoption rate. More organizations than ever are adopting Splunk to make informed decisions in areas such as IT operations, information security, and the Internet of Things. The first two chapters of the book will get you started with a simple Splunk installation and set up of a sample machine data generator, called Eventgen. After this, you will learn to create various reports, dashboards, and alerts. You will also explore Splunk's Pivot functionality to model data for business users. You will then have the opportunity to test-drive Splunk's powerful HTTP Event Collector. After covering the core Splunk functionality, you'll be provided with some real-world best practices for using Splunk, and information on how to build upon what you've learned in this book. Throughout the book, there will be additional comments and best practice recommendations from a member of the SplunkTrust Community, called "Tips from the Fez".

Preface

Who this book is for

What this book covers

To get the most out of this book

Get in touch

Free Chapter

Splunk – Getting Started

Your Splunk account

Installing Splunk on Windows

Installing Splunk on Linux

Creating a Splunk app

Populating data with Eventgen

Controlling Splunk

Configuring Eventgen

Viewing the Destinations app

Creating your first dashboard

Summary

Bringing in Data

Splunk and big data

Splunk data sources

Creating indexes

Buckets

Log files as data input

Splunk events and fields

Extracting new fields

Summary

Search Processing Language

Anatomy of a search

Time modifiers

Filtering search results

Search command – stats

Search command – top/rare

Search commands – chart and timechart

Search command – eval

Search command – rex

Summary

Reporting, Alerts, and Search Optimization

Data classification with Event Types

Data normalization with Tags

Data enrichment with Lookups

Creating and scheduling reports

Creating alerts

Search and Report acceleration

Scheduling options

Summary indexing

Summary

Dynamic Dashboarding

Creating effective dashboards

Types of dashboards

Form inputs

Creating a time range input

Creating a radio input

Creating a drop-down input

Static real-time dashboard

Creating a choropleth map

Summary

Data Models and Pivot

Creating a data model

Data model acceleration

Rearranging your dashboard

Summary

HTTP Event Collector

What is the HEC?

How does the HEC work?

How data flows to the HEC

Summary

Best Practices and Advanced Queries

Indexes for testing

Searching within an index

Search within a limited time frame

Quick searches via fast mode

Using event sampling

Use the fields command to improve search performance

Advanced searches

Summary

Taking Splunk to the Organization

Common organizational use cases

Splunk architecture considerations

The Splunk community and online resources

Summary

Customer Reviews

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Search command – top/rare

A quick way to get a summarized table based on the fields is by using the top and rare commands. Run this search command:

SPL> index=main | top http_uri

Notice that the result automatically grouped the URLs by count, calculated the percentage of each row against the whole data set, and sorted them by count in descending order. You can see a sample result in the following screenshot:

You may further tweak this search command by adding command options such as limit and showperc. Say, for example, you only want to see the top five URLs, but you do not want to see the percent column. This is the SPL to achieve that:

SPL> index=main | top url limit=5 showperc=false

Now try the same commands, but use rare instead of top. The term rare will find those events that are the most unlikely ones. This can be a useful qualifier to use for determining...