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 search head clusters

A Splunk search head cluster is a set of three or more Splunk search heads working together as one to improve search capacity and increase availability against single server failures. The exact number of search heads in the search head cluster is determined by the number of concurrent users, the number of searches run on the search heads, and the level of availability required. With a traditional unclustered search head arrangement, a failure of one search head results in the loss of search artifacts or search results, configurations, apps/add-ons, and search jobs. Configuring search heads into a search head cluster can improve availability and scalability as the number of users and searches increases.

Figure 9.1 illustrates a simple three-node search head cluster:

Figure 9.1 – A search head cluster

Figure 9.1 – A search head cluster

There are three main components of a search head cluster:

  • The search head cluster members include the...