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 indexer clusters

A Splunk indexer cluster is a group of two or more indexers that work together to ensure that data is available to the users even in the event of node failures. In this section, we will explore how Splunk indexer clusters work. We will look at the components of a Splunk indexer cluster, review how indexing and searching work in an indexer cluster, and explore the concept of search and replication factors.

To understand the importance of a cluster, let’s explore what happens when we have standalone indexers. Let’s consider a simple scenario, as depicted in Figure 9.2:

Figure 9.2 – Example of unclustered Splunk indexers

Figure 9.2 – Example of unclustered Splunk indexers

There are two forwarders (fw1 and fw2) and three indexers (idx1, idx2, and idx3) in this scenario. Forwarder fw1 forwards Windows event logs and IIS logs to indexers idx1 and idx2, respectively. Forwarder fw2 forwards firewall logs to indexer idx3. There is no sharing of information...