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)

Field extractions

Regardless of how you are using the data in Splunk to solve business problems, you'll be working with the values in various fields within each event. Splunk extracts event fields in three ways:

  • Index-time: Fields are extracted and stored when events are indexed
  • Search-time: Fields are automatically extracted from key-value pairs in each event
  • Explicitly extracted fields: Fields are created from specified locations within each event at search time

And as discussed in Chapter 6, Searching with Splunk, you can use Splunk commands, such as eval and stats, to create new fields from data in existing fields.

Index-time field extractions

Splunk extracts and stores several default metadata fields, such as timestamp...