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)

Installing Splunk universal forwarder

Since much of the data you will ingest into Splunk will likely come from the logs of application and web servers, we'll need to install a universal forwarder on a server and configure it to monitor specific logs and send that data to Splunk for indexing, along with some configuration settings that tell Splunk how to parse the logs and which index to store the data in.

Installation steps

The Splunk universal forwarder is basically a specialized instance of Splunk Enterprise with most features disabled, and it is a separate binary, but you can follow the same process as was used for installing Splunk Enterprise in Chapter 3, Installing and Configuring Splunk, for both Linux and Windows...