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 data models

The concept of a dataset is well-known in the field of data management. A dataset is a collection of data that serves a particular purpose. It’s usually used to refer to data expressed in some form of a table with columns and rows. This could be a file where columns are defined by comma- or tab-separated values, a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, or a SQL database table. Each column defines a particular variable, and each row represents a separate entity in the collection. BOTS dataset v1 (https://github.com/splunk/botsv1), which we used in the first few chapters of this book, represents a collection of datasets. We can use the Datasets page to view and manage datasets. There is a link to this page from the Apps | Searching and Reporting area.

Figure 10.1 shows the navigation menu in the Searching and Reporting app:

Figure 10.1 – The Search and Reporting navigation menu

Figure 10.1 – The Search and Reporting navigation menu

Clicking on the Datasets link opens the Datasets...