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)

Building a form-based dashboard


The first part of a form-based dashboard is deciding which inputs our users will care about, and usually this starts with the time range picker module.

Let's create a dashboard out of the report we made earlier from Linux df data. When we open up our report, we notice that there is a useful option in the top right-hand section Add to Dashboard:

When we click on that button we get this popup, and we have to choose a name for it:

In this case, I choose myFirstDashboard, and click Save.

On the next popup, just click View Dashboard and Splunk will take you right to it.

Now we understand that our report gives us data for a single day on all machines, and some of our users would like to be able to see data for last week as well, as only a single host is experiencing errors.

The easiest way to do this is by adding the time range picker, and a Text module, then set their tokens to be passed down to the original search. This will allow the user to select the time, and...