Book Image

Implementing Splunk 7, Third Edition - Third Edition

Book Image

Implementing Splunk 7, Third Edition - Third Edition

Overview of this book

Splunk is the leading platform that fosters an efficient methodology and delivers ways to search, monitor, and analyze growing amounts of big data. This book will allow you to implement new services and utilize them to quickly and efficiently process machine-generated big data. We introduce you to all the new features, improvements, and offerings of Splunk 7. We cover the new modules of Splunk: Splunk Cloud and the Machine Learning Toolkit to ease data usage. Furthermore, you will learn to use search terms effectively with Boolean and grouping operators. You will learn not only how to modify your search to make your searches fast but also how to use wildcards efficiently. Later you will learn how to use stats to aggregate values, a chart to turn data, and a time chart to show values over time; you'll also work with fields and chart enhancements and learn how to create a data model with faster data model acceleration. Once this is done, you will learn about XML Dashboards, working with apps, building advanced dashboards, configuring and extending Splunk, advanced deployments, and more. Finally, we teach you how to use the Machine Learning Toolkit and best practices and tips to help you implement Splunk services effectively and efficiently. By the end of this book, you will have learned about the Splunk software as a whole and implemented Splunk services in your tasks at projects
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Splunk instance types


In a distributed deployment, different Splunk processes will serve different purposes. There are four stages of processing that are generally spread across two to four layers. The stages of processing include:

  • Input: This stage consumes raw data from log files, ports, or scripts.
  • Parsing: This stage splits the raw data into events, parses time, sets base metadata, runs transforms, and so on.
  • Indexing: This stage stores the data and optimizes the indexes.
  • Searching: This stage runs queries and presents the results to the user. All these different stages can be accomplished in one process, but splitting them across servers can improve performance as the log volumes and search load increase.

Splunk forwarders

Each machine that contains the log files generally runs a Splunk forwarder process. The job of this process is to read the logs on that machine or to run scripted inputs.

This installation is either of the following:

  • A full installation of Splunk, configured to forward data...