Book Image

Implementing Splunk 7, Third Edition - Third Edition

Book Image

Implementing Splunk 7, Third Edition - Third Edition

Overview of this book

Splunk is the leading platform that fosters an efficient methodology and delivers ways to search, monitor, and analyze growing amounts of big data. This book will allow you to implement new services and utilize them to quickly and efficiently process machine-generated big data. We introduce you to all the new features, improvements, and offerings of Splunk 7. We cover the new modules of Splunk: Splunk Cloud and the Machine Learning Toolkit to ease data usage. Furthermore, you will learn to use search terms effectively with Boolean and grouping operators. You will learn not only how to modify your search to make your searches fast but also how to use wildcards efficiently. Later you will learn how to use stats to aggregate values, a chart to turn data, and a time chart to show values over time; you'll also work with fields and chart enhancements and learn how to create a data model with faster data model acceleration. Once this is done, you will learn about XML Dashboards, working with apps, building advanced dashboards, configuring and extending Splunk, advanced deployments, and more. Finally, we teach you how to use the Machine Learning Toolkit and best practices and tips to help you implement Splunk services effectively and efficiently. By the end of this book, you will have learned about the Splunk software as a whole and implemented Splunk services in your tasks at projects
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Common data sources


Your data may come from a number of sources; these can be files, network ports, or scripts. Let's walk through a few common scenarios.

Monitoring logs on servers

In this scenario, servers write their logs to a local drive, and a forwarder process monitors these logs. This is the typical Splunk installation.

The advantages of this approach include the following:

  • This process is highly optimized. If the indexers are not overworked, events are usually searchable within a few seconds.
  • Slowdowns caused by network problems or indexer overload are handled gracefully. The forwarder process will pick up where it left off when the slowdown is resolved.
  • The agent is light, typically using less than 100 megabytes of RAM and a few percent of one CPU. These values go up with the amount of new data written and the number of files being tracked. See inputs.conf in Chapter 11, Configuring Splunk, for details.
  • Logs without a time zone specified will inherit the time zone of the machine running...