Book Image

Splunk Best Practices

Book Image

Splunk Best Practices

Overview of this book

This book will give you an edge over others through insights that will help you in day-to-day instances. When you're working with data from various sources in Splunk and performing analysis on this data, it can be a bit tricky. With this book, you will learn the best practices of working with Splunk. You'll learn about tools and techniques that will ease your life with Splunk, and will ultimately save you time. In some cases, it will adjust your thinking of what Splunk is, and what it can and cannot do. To start with, you'll get to know the best practices to get data into Splunk, analyze data, and package apps for distribution. Next, you'll discover the best practices in logging, operations, knowledge management, searching, and reporting. To finish off, we will teach you how to troubleshoot Splunk searches, as well as deployment, testing, and development with Splunk.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Agents


These are the thin and thick clients from Splunk that can be used to forward data to Splunk.

Splunk Universal Forwarder

Splunk Universal Forwarder is a light agent that is installed on a device that enables you with quite a bit of functionality to get data into a Splunk index. The name is pretty self-explanatory, as this agent is designed to simply forward data to a Splunk index. This is often the most common method to get data into Splunk.

Splunk Heavy Forwarder

This is a heavy agent. It is basically a full version of Splunk that is installed on a device in order to perform the same data-forwarding functionality as the Universal Forwarder, with the added benefit of being able to perform some more complex functions.

It is often used as a centralized point for data gathering of multiple systems, as well as a data router to collect, route, and scrub data appropriately before it hits an indexer. These are usually standalone machines within your Splunk infrastructure.

Search Head Forwarder

If...