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

The structure of a Splunk configuration file

The .conf files used by Splunk look very similar to .ini files. A simple configuration looks like this:

#settings for foo 
[foo] 
bar=1 
la = 2 

Let's look at the following couple of definitions:

  • stanza: A stanza is used to group attributes. Our stanza in this example is [foo]. A common synonym for this is section. Keep in mind the following key points:
    • A stanza name must be unique in a single file
    • The order does not matter
  • attribute: An attribute is a name-value pair. Our attributes in this example are bar and la. A common synonym is parameter. Keep in mind the following key points:
    • The attribute name must not contain whitespace or the equals sign.
    • Each attribute belongs to the stanza defined previously; if the attribute appears before all stanzas, the attribute belongs to the stanza [default].
    • The attribute name must be unique...