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)

Creating Splunk searches

A Splunk search is created from a series of commands and arguments using SPL. The commands and arguments are chained together using the pipe character (|) such that the output of one command is fed into the next command to the right.

Be aware that Splunk assumes the very first command on the search bar is search you don't have to add it (unless you're creating a sub-search, in which case search is the first command to be given). I like to use Ctrl + Enter to stack my commands within the search bar—this makes it much easier to read and comprehend search strings, such as the following:

index=<index> <filter> <"text string to match"> 
| command1 <arguments>
| command2 <arguments>
| visualization commands & arguments

You can create searches most effectively by following some basic steps....