A very common question that may often arise is: "Which values are the most common?" When looking for errors, you are probably interested in figuring out what piece of code has the most errors. The top command provides a very simple way to answer this question.
Let's step through a few examples.
First, run a search for errors:
sourcetype="tm1" error
The preceding example searches for the word error in all source types starting with the character string "tm1*" (with the asterisk being the wildcard character).
In my data, it finds events containing the word error, a sample of which is listed in the following screenshot:
Since I happen to know that the data I am searching is made up of application log files generated throughout the year, it might be interesting to see the month that had the most errors logged...