Book Image

Implementing Splunk: Big Data Reporting and Development for Operational Intelligence

By : VINCENT BUMGARNER
Book Image

Implementing Splunk: Big Data Reporting and Development for Operational Intelligence

By: VINCENT BUMGARNER

Overview of this book

Splunk is a data collection, indexing, and visualization engine for operational intelligence. It's a powerful and versatile search and analysis engine that lets you investigate, troubleshoot, monitor, alert, and report on everything that's happening in your entire IT infrastructure from one location in real time. Splunk collects, indexes, and harnesses all the fast moving machine data generated by our applications, servers, and devices - physical, virtual, and in the cloud.Given a mountain of machine data, this book shows you exactly how to learn to use Splunk to make something useful from it. Depending on your needs, you can learn to search, transform, and display data, or learn to administer your Splunk installation, large or small. "Implementing Splunk: Big Data Reporting and Development for Operational Intelligence" will help you get your job done faster, whether you read from the beginning or jump to what you need to know today. New and experienced users alike will find nuggets of wisdom throughout.This book provides you with valuable examples and step-by-step instructions, showing you how to take advantage of everything Splunk has to offer you, to make the most out of your machine data."Implementing Splunk: Big Data Reporting and Development for Operational Intelligence" takes you on a journey right from inception to a fully functioning implementation of Splunk. Using a real-world data walkthrough, you'll be shown how to search effectively, create fields, build dashboards, reports, and package apps, manage your indexes, integrate into the enterprise, and extend Splunk. This practical implementation guide equips you with high-level knowledge for configuring, deploying, extending, and integrating Splunk. Depending on the goal and skills of the reader, enough topics are covered to get you on your way to dashboard guru, app developer, or enterprise administrator. This book uses examples curates reference, and sage advice to help you make the most of this incredibly powerful tool.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Implementing Splunk: Big Data Reporting and Development for Operational Intelligence
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Logging in to Splunk


The Splunk interface 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 4.3, no browser extensions are required. Splunk Versions 4.2 and earlier require Flash to render graphs. Flash can still be used by older browsers, or for older apps that reference Flash explicitly.

The default port for a Splunk installation is 8000. The address will look like http://mysplunkserver:8000 or http://mysplunkserver.mycompany.com:8000. 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 LDAP.