All throughout this chapter, you have been running Splunk search queries that have returned data. It is important to understand what events and fields are before we go any further, for an understanding of these is essential to comprehending what happens when you run Splunk on the data.
In Splunk, data is classified into events and is like a record, such as a log file entry or other type of input data. An event can have many different attributes or fields or just a few. When you run a successful search query, you will see events returned from the Splunk indexes the search is being run against. If you are looking at live streaming data, events can come in very quickly through Splunk.
Every event is given a number of default fields. For a complete listing, go to http://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/6.3.2/Data/Aboutdefaultfields. We will now go through...