Growing in popularity as a data visualization option, sparklines are inline charts that represent the general shape of a variation (typically over time) in some measurement (such as miles per gallon or home value), in a simple and highly condensed way. Splunk provides you with the ability to add sparklines to statistics and chart searches, improving their usefulness and overall information density.

A prior Splunk search example is as follows:

sourcetype=csv "Current Forecast" "Direct"  "513500" | rename 100000 as "FCST", "FY 2012" as "Year"| eval RFCST= round(FCST) | chart avg(RFCST) by Year

The preceding search creates the following results table:

As you can see, the preceding search generates a table that shows the average forecasted amounts by fiscal year in just two columns.

If you add the keyword sparkline to the search pipeline, you can have Splunk include sparklines with the results, as shown here:

sourcetype=csv "Current Forecast" "Direct"  "513500" | rename 100000 as "FCST...