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

Dissecting a Splunk query

A Splunk query consists of different clauses separated by the pipe symbol (|), as seen in Unix commands. For example, we can list the files in a folder and search for the inputs.conf filename all at once using the following command on a Unix command line:

$ ls -l | grep inputs.conf
-rw-------    1 botsuser    botsuser    123 Jul    9 13:15 inputs.conf

The ls -l command lists all the files in the folder. The result of this command is passed to the grep command and tells us whether the inputs.conf file is included in the list.

Let’s look at another example. The following command determines whether the Splunk process is running on a Splunk server by running the ps command (left-hand side of the pipe) and performing a grep search (right-hand side):

$ ps -ef | grep splunkd
501    4010         1 ...