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

Configuration distribution


As we have covered, in some depth, configurations in Splunk are simply directories of plain text files. Distribution essentially consists of copying these configurations to the appropriate machines and restarting the instances. You can either use your own system for distribution, such as puppet or simply a set of scripts, or use the deployment server included with Splunk.

Using your own deployment system

The advantage of using your own system is that you already know how to use it. Assuming that you have normalized your apps as described in the section Using apps to organize configuration, deploying apps to a forwarder or indexer consists of the following steps:

  1. Set aside existing apps at $SPLUNK_HOME/etc/apps/.

  2. Copy apps into $SPLUNK_HOME/etc/apps/.

  3. Restart Splunk forwarder. Note that this needs to be done as the user that is running Splunk, either by calling the service script or calling su. On Windows, restart the splunkd service.

Assuming you already have a system...