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 an HTTP Event Collector

Another very versatile and highly scalable way of getting data into Splunk is via the HTTP Event Collector (HEC), which is a solution that listens for HTTP requests containing JSON objects. The HTTP Event Collector can collect data at extremely high volumes from many devices and data sources, all on a single port. Another interesting feature of using HEC is that the host, index, source, and sourcetype associated with a given data source can be specified within the JSON object of each received event.

The HTTP Event Collector uses a token-based authentication model; you configure a new token in Splunk, and give that token to your application developers who then include it in each event sent to Splunk.

To set up the HTTP Event Collector, you first configure the global settings, which includes the HTTP endpoint it will listen on – by default...