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)

Splunk sourcetypes

Splunk uses specific configuration files for telling the indexers how to parse incoming data to properly extract the timestamps and specific event fields, and how to identify when one event ends and the next one starts (linebreaks); this is done with a props.conf file. In some cases, you'll need to tell Splunk how to transform (modify or add) data from existing fields into new fields and/or modify or mask those fields–this is done with a transforms.conf file. The props.conf file contains stanzas that define a sourcetype and how it behaves; entries in the props.conf stanzas can also reference stanzas in a transforms.conf file to perform transformation operations.

A sourcetype is one of the default metadata fields that Splunk software assigns to all incoming data. It tells Splunk what kind of data is being ingested so that it can identify the...