New to version 6.4 is event sampling. Like the fact that you only need a drop of blood to test for the amount of sugar and sodium levels in your blood, you often only need a small amount of data from your dataset to make conclusions about that dataset. The addition of event sampling to the Splunk toolset is particularly useful, because there is often so much data available and what you are really seeking is to take measurements from that data quickly:

Event sampling uses a sample ratio value that reduces the number of results. If a typical search result returns 1,000 events, a 1:10 event sampling ratio will return 100 events. As you can see from the previous screenshot, these ratios can significantly cut the amount of data indexed, and can range from a fairly large ratio (which can be set using the Custom setting) to one as small as 1:100,000 (or even smaller, again using the Custom setting).

This is not suitable for saved searches for which you need accurate counts. This...