Dashboards are a way for you to capture, group, and automate tables and charts into useful and informative views.

In this chapter, we will quickly cover the wizards provided in Splunk 6.2 and then dig into the underlying XML. With XML, you can easily build interactive forms, further customize panels, and use the same query for multiple panels, among other things (XML—an industry standard meta language—is a powerful tool. It is suggested that the reader have some knowledge of its fundamentals. A variety of sources are currently available outside of this book). We will also cover how and when to schedule the generation of dashboards to reduce both the wait time for users and the load on the server. This chapter is laid out under the following topics: