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

Formatting and transforming data

In this section, we will look at some commands that can be added to the basic queries that we wrote in the previous section. To use these commands, we can add a pipe symbol and follow it with the new command.

The first command we will look at is the eval command. The eval command is one of the most important formatting commands in Splunk. This command allows us to perform calculations and either change the value of fields or create new fields. The form of the eval command is as follows:

…| eval <field>=<expression>, [<field>=<expression>]

Note that we use the pipe symbol in this search. The left-hand side of the pipe symbol passes results to the eval statement. If the field specified in eval exists, then the value of the field is replaced. If not, Splunk creates a new field. Note that this new field is not persistent – that is, it only exists for the duration of the search. Using eval does not change the...