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)

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Splunk – Getting Started, covers concepts to extend Splunk to your organization. We cover the vast Splunk community and online ecosystem.

Chapter 2, Bringing in Data, teaches essential concepts such as forwarders, indexes, events, event types, fields, sources, and sourcetypes.

Chapter 3, Search Processing Language, covers more about using search and other commands to analyze your data.

Chapter 4, Reporting, Alerts, and Search Optimization, shows how to classify your data using Event Types, enrich it using Lookups, and normalize it using Tags.

Chapter 5, Dynamic Dashboarding, creates a fully functional form-based dashboard that will allow you to change the inputs and affect the dashboard data by using tokens and assigning them to search panels.

Chapter 6, Data Models and Pivot, uses a very intuitive Pivot editor to create three different visualizations: area chart, pie chart, and single value with a trend sparkline.

Chapter 7, HTTP Event Collector, discusses HTTP event collector (HEC) and how it can be used to send data directly from an application to Splunk.

Chapter 8, Best Practices and Advanced Queries, introduces a few extra skills that will help make you a powerful Splunker.

Chapter 9, Taking Splunk to the Organization, concludes our book with thoughts, concepts, and ideas to take this new knowledge ahead and apply to an organization.