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

Event annotations


An annotation is generally defined as an explanation or comment; event annotations are new in Splunk version 7.0. With the implementation of this feature, you can now add explanations or context to trends returned by Splunk (time) charts. Splunk event annotations are presented as colored flags that display time stamp information and custom descriptions in labels when you hover your mouse over them, as shown in the example in the following screenshot:

To illustrate how an event annotation could be used, Splunk offers an example where administrators are monitoring machine logs looking for user login errors. There is a Splunk chart that has been created to show login errors over time, and an event annotation has been added to flag the times when the servers are down for maintenance (during that time period).

With the server downtimes annotated, it can easily be concluded that the two events (servers down and login errors) are related. Using event annotations in this way gives...