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

Writing a scripted alert action to process results


Another option to interface with an external system is to run a custom alert action using the results of a saved search. Splunk provides a simple example in $SPLUNK_HOME/bin/scripts/echo.sh. Let's try it out and see what we get using the following steps:

  1. Create a saved search. For this test, do something cheap, such as writing the following code:
index=_internal | head 100 | stats count by sourcetype 
  1. Schedule the search to run at a point in the future. I set it to run every five minutes just for this test.
  2. Enable Run a script and type in echo.sh:

The script places the output into $SPLUNK_HOME/bin/scripts/echo_output.txt.

In my case, the output is as follows:

'/opt/splunk/bin/scripts/echo.sh' '4' 'index=_internal | head 100 
| stats count by sourcetype' 'index=_internal | head 100 | stats 
count by sourcetype' 'testingAction' 'Saved Search [testingAction] 
always(4)' 'http://vlbmba.local:8000/app/search/@go?sid=scheduler__ 
admin__search__testingAction_at_1352667600_2efa1666cc496da4...