Book Image

Splunk 7.x Quick Start Guide

By : James H. Baxter
Book Image

Splunk 7.x Quick Start Guide

By: James H. Baxter

Overview of this book

Splunk is a leading platform and solution for collecting, searching, and extracting value from ever increasing amounts of big data - and big data is eating the world! This book covers all the crucial Splunk topics and gives you the information and examples to get the immediate job done. You will find enough insights to support further research and use Splunk to suit any business environment or situation. Splunk 7.x Quick Start Guide gives you a thorough understanding of how Splunk works. You will learn about all the critical tasks for architecting, implementing, administering, and utilizing Splunk Enterprise to collect, store, retrieve, format, analyze, and visualize machine data. You will find step-by-step examples based on real-world experience and practical use cases that are applicable to all Splunk environments. There is a careful balance between adequate coverage of all the critical topics with short but relevant deep-dives into the configuration options and steps to carry out the day-to-day tasks that matter. By the end of the book, you will be a confident and proficient Splunk architect and administrator.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Selecting a Splunk configuration

At a high level, the type and size of the Splunk solution you build will depend mostly on two factors:

  • The volume of data you will be indexing each day
  • The peak number of concurrent searches that will be running

The volume of data indexed will be the average daily total of all the inputs from your various data sources—server logs, network and security devices, and so on. The number of concurrent searches includes both ad hoc searches from users, and the number of scheduled saved searches that will be running periodically to populate reports, dashboards, and alerts. To determine these factors you will need to collect some data from your user communities and do some fairly straightforward calculations.

Data collection – data inputs

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