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 the Splunk search interface

Now that we’ve understood how Splunk stores indexed data, it’s time to delve into the mechanics of the Splunk query language. We saw examples of simple queries in Chapter 3, Onboarding and Normalizing Data. Some of the queries we wrote in Chapter 3, Onboarding and Normalizing Data, searched the botsv1 index and used keywords such as sourcetype and earliest. Examples included the following:

index=botsv1 earliest=0
index=botsv1 sourcetype=iis http_referer=*
index=botsv1 earliest=0 sourcetype=suricata
| eval bytes=bytes_in+bytes_out
index=botsv1 earliest=0 sourcetype=iis referer_domain=*
| table _time, cs_Referer, referer_domain
index=botsv1 earliest=0 sourcetype="WinEventLog:Security"
| stats count by Account_Name

In this section, we will write some basic Splunk queries, but first, let’s look at the Splunk search interface:

  1. We will type up our Splunk search queries using the Search and Reporting app...