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)

Best practices for administering Splunk

To avoid distractions in the previous sections of this chapter and in Chapter 4, Getting Data into Splunk, I've reserved a few additional comments on topics you will want to consider for establishing some best practices as you administer your Splunk environment, understanding of course that these have to be tailored to your particular organization's culture, needs, and IT environment.

Let's first talk about developing a naming convention for indexes and source types. A search of the web will provide a number of discussions and ideas on the topic; here are a few options I've settled on.

Index naming conventions

When creating indexes, use lowercase names (Splunk changes...