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

Using external commands


The Splunk search language is extremely powerful, but at times, it may be either difficult or impossible to accomplish some piece of logic by using nothing but the search language. To deal with this, Splunk allows external commands to be written in Python. A number of commands ship with the product, and a number of commands are available in apps at http://splunk-base.splunk.com/.

Let's try out a few of the included commands. The documentation for the commands is included with other search commands at http://docs.splunk.com/. You can find a list of all included commands, both internal and external, by searching for all search commands. We will write our own commands in Chapter 13, Extending Splunk.

Extracting values from XML

Fairly often, machine data is written in XML format. Splunk will index this data without any issue, but it has no native support for XML. Though XML is not an ideal logging format, it can usually be parsed simply enough. Two commands are included...