Book Image

Data Analytics Using Splunk 9.x

By : Dr. Nadine Shillingford
5 (1)
Book Image

Data Analytics Using Splunk 9.x

5 (1)
By: Dr. Nadine Shillingford

Overview of this book

Splunk 9 improves on the existing Splunk tool to include important features such as federated search, observability, performance improvements, and dashboarding. This book helps you to make the best use of the impressive and new features to prepare a Splunk installation that can be employed in the data analysis process. Starting with an introduction to the different Splunk components, such as indexers, search heads, and forwarders, this Splunk book takes you through the step-by-step installation and configuration instructions for basic Splunk components using Amazon Web Services (AWS) instances. You’ll import the BOTS v1 dataset into a search head and begin exploring data using the Splunk Search Processing Language (SPL), covering various types of Splunk commands, lookups, and macros. After that, you’ll create tables, charts, and dashboards using Splunk’s new Dashboard Studio, and then advance to work with clustering, container management, data models, federated search, bucket merging, and more. By the end of the book, you’ll not only have learned everything about the latest features of Splunk 9 but also have a solid understanding of the performance tuning techniques in the latest version.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Part 1: Getting Started with Splunk
5
Part 2: Visualizing Data with Splunk
10
Part 3: Advanced Topics in Splunk

Understanding Splunk indexing and buckets

The strength of Splunk comes from the way data is indexed. Logically, a Splunk index is a repository of data that is stored in a uniform manner to make searching efficient. Physically, an index is a set of subdirectories called buckets. The term indexing in Splunk refers to the process whereby data coming from multiple sources into Splunk is organized into Splunk indexes. In this section, we will explore the mechanisms used to store data in indexes and buckets.

Raw data is forwarded from the source into Splunk. This data is converted into Splunk events, which are organized into indexes. An index is an immutable repository of data – that is, once data is added to an index, it cannot be edited. This goes back to the concept of the immutability of big data that we discussed in Chapter 1, Introduction to Splunk and its Core Components. There is no way to delete individual events from an index, but Splunk allows the following:

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