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

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

    • 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 above; if the attribute appears above all stanzas, the attribute belongs to the stanza [default]

    • The attribute name must be unique in a single stanza but not in a configuration

    • Each attribute must have its own line and can only use one line

    • Spaces around the equal sign...