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)

Configuring other data source inputs

Some devices such as firewalls, routers, and switches do not generate logs directly; instead, they send their log and event data over network ports to, typically, a syslog server that stores the data in log files in some directory. The best practice for handling this scenario is to install a universal forwarder on the syslog server so that you can configure multiple inputs (one for each type of data) in inputs.conf to assign the appropriate index and sourcetype for each data source type. You will also need to assign a host in the inputs.conf file for each input, or do some research on how to leverage DNS to identify the proper hostname for each data source (which is outside the scope of this book). However, if you simply must stream this data from the devices directly to Splunk, there are two approaches that will work.

One approach is to send...