Set the time to the minimum time that you believe will be required to locate relevant events. For a chatty log, this may be as little as a minute. If you don't know when the events occurred, you might search a larger time frame and then zoom in by clicking on the timeline while the search is running.

Specify the index if you have multiple indexes. It's good to get into the habit of starting your queries with the index name. For example, index=myapplicationindex error bob.

Specify other fields that are relevant. The most common fields to specify are sourcetype and host. For example, index=myapplicationindex sourcetype="impl_splunk_gen" error bob. If you find yourself specifying the field source on a regular basis, you could probably benefit from defining more source types. Avoid using the sourcetype field to capture...