Since the goal of this chapter is understanding Splunk dashboards (and not the fundamentals of searching), we'll utilize several new simple search strings as well as some of the queries from previous chapters to illustrate certain points. So, let's start by making an operational dashboard for showing Forecast Events within our indexed data. The following is a simple search string to begin our exercise:

sourcetype="*" Forecast | timechart count as "Forecast Events" by date_month

In addition to our search string, I've selected Previous Year from the Splunk presets (see the preceding image).

This will produce a graph like this one:

To add this to a dashboard, we can perform the following steps: