Book Image

Improving Your Splunk Skills

By : James D. Miller, Paul R. Johnson, Josh Diakun, Derek Mock
Book Image

Improving Your Splunk Skills

By: James D. Miller, Paul R. Johnson, Josh Diakun, Derek Mock

Overview of this book

Splunk makes it easy for you to take control of your data and drive your business with the cutting edge of operational intelligence and business analytics. Through this Learning Path, you'll implement new services and utilize them to quickly and efficiently process machine-generated big data. You'll begin with an introduction to the new features, improvements, and offerings of Splunk 7. You'll learn to efficiently use wildcards and modify your search to make it faster. You'll learn how to enhance your applications by using XML dashboards and configuring and extending Splunk. You'll also find step-by-step demonstrations that'll walk you through building an operational intelligence application. As you progress, you'll explore data models and pivots to extend your intelligence capabilities. By the end of this Learning Path, you'll have the skills and confidence to implement various Splunk services in your projects. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: Implementing Splunk 7 - Third Edition by James Miller Splunk Operational Intelligence Cookbook - Third Edition by Paul R Johnson, Josh Diakun, et al
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page

Logging in to Splunk

The Splunk GUI (Splunk is also accessible through its command-line interface (CLI) and REST API) is web-based, which means that no client needs to be installed. Newer browsers with fast JavaScript engines, such as Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, work better with the interface. As of Splunk Version 6.2.0 (and version 7.0 is no different), no browser extensions are required.

The default port (which can be changed) for a Splunk installation is still 8000. The address will look like http://mysplunkserver:8000 or http://mysplunkserver.mycompany.com:8000:

The Splunk interface

If you have installed Splunk on your local machine, the address can be some variant of http://localhost:8000, http://127.0.0.1:8000, http://machinename:8000, or http://machinename.local:8000.

Once you determine the address, the first page you will see is the login screen. The default username is admin with the password changeme. The first time you log in, you will be prompted to change the password for the admin user. It is a good idea to change this password to prevent unwanted changes to your deployment.

By default, accounts are configured and stored within Splunk. Authentication can be configured to use another system, for instance, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP). By default, Splunk authenticates locally. If LDAP is set up, the order is as follows: LDAP / Local.