Book Image

Splunk 7 Essentials - Third Edition

By : J-P Contreras, Steven Koelpin, Erickson Delgado, Betsy Page Sigman
Book Image

Splunk 7 Essentials - Third Edition

By: J-P Contreras, Steven Koelpin, Erickson Delgado, Betsy Page Sigman

Overview of this book

Splunk is a search, reporting, and analytics software platform for machine data, which has an ever-growing market adoption rate. More organizations than ever are adopting Splunk to make informed decisions in areas such as IT operations, information security, and the Internet of Things. The first two chapters of the book will get you started with a simple Splunk installation and set up of a sample machine data generator, called Eventgen. After this, you will learn to create various reports, dashboards, and alerts. You will also explore Splunk's Pivot functionality to model data for business users. You will then have the opportunity to test-drive Splunk's powerful HTTP Event Collector. After covering the core Splunk functionality, you'll be provided with some real-world best practices for using Splunk, and information on how to build upon what you've learned in this book. Throughout the book, there will be additional comments and best practice recommendations from a member of the SplunkTrust Community, called "Tips from the Fez".
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Summary

In this chapter, you learned a number of basic Splunk concepts that you need to get started with this powerful tool. You learned how to install Splunk and configure a new Splunk app. You ran a simple search against the Splunk internal logs to ensure that the application is functional. You then installed a Splunk add-on called Eventgen, which you used to populate dummy data into Splunk in real time. You were shown how to control Splunk using the web user interface and the CLI. Finally, you created your very first Splunk dashboard, based off a single search. We will get a lot more creative with dashboards in additional chapters later in this book.

Now, we will go on to Chapter 2, Bringing in Data, to learn more about how to input data.