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

Using macros to reuse logic

A macro serves the purpose of replacing bits of search language with expanded phrases (additionally, macros have other uses, such as assisting in workflow creation).

Using macros can help you reuse logic and greatly reduce the length of queries.

Let's use the following as our example case:

sourcetype="impl_splunk_gen_SomeMoreLogs" user=mary 
| transaction maxpause=5m user 
| stats avg(duration) avg(eventcount) 

Creating a simple macro

Let's take the last two lines of our query and convert them to a macro. First, navigate to Settings | Advanced search | Search macros and click on New:

Walking through our fields, we have the following:

  • Destination app: This is where the macro will live...