Book Image

Splunk Essentials - Second Edition

By : Betsy Page Sigman, Soni, Erickson Delgado
Book Image

Splunk Essentials - Second Edition

By: Betsy Page Sigman, Soni, Erickson Delgado

Overview of this book

Splunk is a search, analysis, and reporting platform for machine data, which has a high adoption on the market. More and more organizations want to adopt Splunk to use their data to make informed decisions. This book is for anyone who wants to manage data with Splunk. You’ll start with very basics of Splunk— installing Splunk—and then move on to searching machine data with Splunk. You will gather data from different sources, isolate them by indexes, classify them into source types, and tag them with the essential fields. After this, you will learn to create various reports, XML forms, and alerts. You will then continue using the Pivot Model to transform the data models into visualization. You will also explore visualization with D3 in Splunk. Finally you’ll be provided with some real-world best practices in using Splunk.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Splunk and big data


Splunk is useful for datasets of all types, and it allows you to use big data tools on datasets of all sizes. But with the recent focus on big data, its usefulness becomes even more apparent. Big data is a term used everywhere these days, but one that few people understand. In this part of the chapter, we will discuss aspects of big data and the terms that describe those aspects.

Streaming data

Much of the data that is large and comes quickly does not need to be kept. For instance, consider a mechanical plant; there can be many sensors that collect data on all parts of the assembly line. The significance of this data is primarily to be able to alert someone to a possible upcoming problem (through noticing a bad trend) or to a current problem (by drawing attention to a metric that has exceeded some designated level); and much of it does not need to be kept for a long period of time. Often this type of data loses its importance once its timeliness expires and its main usefulness...