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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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Creating alerts

Alerts are crucial in IT and security operations. They provide proactive awareness of the state of the systems to those persons who monitor and control them. Alerts enable you to act fast when an issue has been detected, as opposed to waiting for a user to run a report and find the issue, which may or may not happen. In today's world, every minute someone has breached your network is costly and potentially devastating.

However, alerts are only good if they are controlled and if they provide enough actionable information. They should not be created on low-priority items or triggered too often to the point they lose relevance.

Tip from the Fez: Out-of-the box functionality for alerts is most commonly driven to email. Users may also want to explore the use of text messages. When Splunk doesn't provide something out of the box, there is a good chance the...