Book Image

Splunk 7.x Quick Start Guide

By : James H. Baxter
Book Image

Splunk 7.x Quick Start Guide

By: James H. Baxter

Overview of this book

Splunk is a leading platform and solution for collecting, searching, and extracting value from ever increasing amounts of big data - and big data is eating the world! This book covers all the crucial Splunk topics and gives you the information and examples to get the immediate job done. You will find enough insights to support further research and use Splunk to suit any business environment or situation. Splunk 7.x Quick Start Guide gives you a thorough understanding of how Splunk works. You will learn about all the critical tasks for architecting, implementing, administering, and utilizing Splunk Enterprise to collect, store, retrieve, format, analyze, and visualize machine data. You will find step-by-step examples based on real-world experience and practical use cases that are applicable to all Splunk environments. There is a careful balance between adequate coverage of all the critical topics with short but relevant deep-dives into the configuration options and steps to carry out the day-to-day tasks that matter. By the end of the book, you will be a confident and proficient Splunk architect and administrator.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Getting Data into Splunk

In this and the following chapter, you will learn how to administer your Splunk deployment, starting with getting data into Splunk. In this context, the term administration includes a wide range of initial setup as well as the day-to-day tasks involved in getting data into Splunk, properly parsed and indexed; managing the indexing and search head clusters so that the data can be searched, deploying Splunk apps, and setting up users and their roles so that they can access the data.

The topics covered in this chapter include the following:

  • Installing and configuring universal forwarders to send log data to Splunk
  • Setting up a heavy forwarder
  • Configuring inputs from other types of data sources
  • How to configure an HTTP Event Collector (HEC) to input data
  • How to configure Splunk to properly parse nonstandard data formats
  • How to distribute configuration files...