Book Image

Splunk Best Practices

Book Image

Splunk Best Practices

Overview of this book

This book will give you an edge over others through insights that will help you in day-to-day instances. When you're working with data from various sources in Splunk and performing analysis on this data, it can be a bit tricky. With this book, you will learn the best practices of working with Splunk. You'll learn about tools and techniques that will ease your life with Splunk, and will ultimately save you time. In some cases, it will adjust your thinking of what Splunk is, and what it can and cannot do. To start with, you'll get to know the best practices to get data into Splunk, analyze data, and package apps for distribution. Next, you'll discover the best practices in logging, operations, knowledge management, searching, and reporting. To finish off, we will teach you how to troubleshoot Splunk searches, as well as deployment, testing, and development with Splunk.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Chapter 6. Searching and Reporting

We are going to learn about the not-so-common searching and reporting techniques that have been used in real-world scenarios in order to present data both accurately and in the pretty format that leadership asks us for. There are also some caveats to the Search Processing Language that we need to understand when performing a search, not only for presentation purposes, but also for presenting accurate data.

We will learn about:

  • General practices (efficiencies):

    • Core fields

    • Case sensitivity

    • Inclusive versus exclusive

  • Search modes:

    • Fast Mode

    • Smart Mode

    • Verbose Mode

  • Advanced charting: 

    • Overlay

    • Xyseries

    • Appending results

    • Day-over-day overlay