Book Image

Splunk 7 Essentials - Third Edition

By : J-P Contreras, Steven Koelpin, Erickson Delgado, Betsy Page Sigman

Book Image

Splunk 7 Essentials - Third Edition

By: J-P Contreras, Steven Koelpin, Erickson Delgado, Betsy Page Sigman

Overview of this book

Splunk is a search, reporting, and analytics software platform for machine data, which has an ever-growing market adoption rate. More organizations than ever are adopting Splunk to make informed decisions in areas such as IT operations, information security, and the Internet of Things. The first two chapters of the book will get you started with a simple Splunk installation and set up of a sample machine data generator, called Eventgen. After this, you will learn to create various reports, dashboards, and alerts. You will also explore Splunk's Pivot functionality to model data for business users. You will then have the opportunity to test-drive Splunk's powerful HTTP Event Collector. After covering the core Splunk functionality, you'll be provided with some real-world best practices for using Splunk, and information on how to build upon what you've learned in this book. Throughout the book, there will be additional comments and best practice recommendations from a member of the SplunkTrust Community, called "Tips from the Fez".

Preface

Who this book is for

What this book covers

To get the most out of this book

Free Chapter

Splunk – Getting Started

Splunk – Getting Started

Your Splunk account

Installing Splunk on Windows

Installing Splunk on Linux

Creating a Splunk app

Populating data with Eventgen

Controlling Splunk

Configuring Eventgen

Viewing the Destinations app

Creating your first dashboard

Bringing in Data

Bringing in Data

Splunk and big data

Splunk data sources

Creating indexes

Log files as data input

Splunk events and fields

Extracting new fields

Search Processing Language

Search Processing Language

Anatomy of a search

Filtering search results

Search command – stats

Search command – top/rare

Search commands – chart and timechart

Search command – eval

Search command – rex

Reporting, Alerts, and Search Optimization

Reporting, Alerts, and Search Optimization

Data classification with Event Types

Data normalization with Tags

Data enrichment with Lookups

Creating and scheduling reports

Creating alerts

Search and Report acceleration

Scheduling options

Summary indexing

Dynamic Dashboarding

Dynamic Dashboarding

Creating effective dashboards

Types of dashboards

Creating a time range input

Creating a radio input

Creating a drop-down input

Static real-time dashboard

Creating a choropleth map

Data Models and Pivot

Data Models and Pivot

Creating a data model

Data model acceleration

Rearranging your dashboard

HTTP Event Collector

HTTP Event Collector

What is the HEC?

How does the HEC work?

How data flows to the HEC

Best Practices and Advanced Queries

Best Practices and Advanced Queries

Indexes for testing

Searching within an index

Search within a limited time frame

Quick searches via fast mode

Using event sampling

Use the fields command to improve search performance

Advanced searches

Taking Splunk to the Organization

Taking Splunk to the Organization

Common organizational use cases

Splunk architecture considerations

The Splunk community and online resources

Customer Reviews

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How data flows to the HEC

Let's begin by looking at how data flows to the HEC. This is a multi-step process that is important to understand.

Logging data

Before Splunk can capture any data, it needs to be packaged from the source, which can be done in a number of different ways:

A Splunk logging library for Java, JavaScript, or .NET
Another agent, such as a JavaScript request library
The Java Apache HTTP client
And lastly, some other client packing data in JSON or raw formats

Before going further, let's review what the JSON format means. A couple of examples of key-value pairs in JSON format are shown here. The key is listed first, then a colon, and then the value of that key. Sequences of key-value pairs must...