A very powerful feature of Splunk is the ability to trigger alerts based on specific conditions in real-time events. From the perspective of operational intelligence, real-time alerting provides the ability to be notified of something that requires immediate action. Real-time alerting in Splunk is based upon an underlying real-time search.

In this recipe, you will create a real-time alert that will trigger anytime there is an error during the checkout stage of our online store. The checkout stage in the purchasing process is where the payment details are submitted by the customer and our sales transactions ultimately occur. Errors here can result in lost sales revenue and lost customers. It is, therefore, important to immediately understand if errors occur such that they can be remediated as soon as possible.