For some time now, Splunk has been a leading light in providing software that allows its users to search, monitor, and visualize data. The massive expansion in machine data seems endless but we are fortunate to have the tools to deliver and analyze this data and allow us to strip out the irrelevant information, presenting to our user base the important data that will help guide business and technology decisions. Two major strengths that Splunk provides are the ability to quickly analyze your data as well as the ability to present this information to your user in an attractive and customizable way. This presentation layer sitting within Splunk as part of the Splunk Web Framework is a powerful development platform from which we can almost endlessly customize the data we are providing. This book focuses directly on the Splunk Web Framework. It is designed to provide hands-on and interesting examples with step-by-step instructions, to help developers think of Splunk as a complete platform instead of software for searching, monitoring, and analyzing machine-generated data. This book provides different and interesting examples instead of the usual “Log, Index, Search, and Graph” and has the reader thinking in terms of Splunk being the first tool they think of when needing to resolve any problem.
Chapter 1, Splunk Web Framework Fundamentals, provides a high-level overview of the framework as well as discussing development environments and collaborating with development teams.
Chapter 2, Presenting Data to Users as a Splunk App, will introduce Splunk Apps and get you to use the Web Interface to create basic dashboards to present their data.
Chapter 3, Expand Your Apps Using Simple XML, expands you knowledge of Splunk App development by introducing Simple XML to manipulate the underlying dashboard code.
Chapter 4, Layouts, Navigation, and Menus, provides you with an overview of how to use Simple XML to control the layout of you dashboards as well as setting up a menu system for you Splunk App.
Chapter 5, Interacting with Your User While Speeding Up App Searches, discusses how to add features to your Simple XML code to allow your user to interact directly with their Splunk data.
Chapter 6, Moving from Simple XML to HTML, introduces HTML dashboards and provides an explanation of the HTML code that is generated as part of the Splunk dashboard.
Chapter 7, JavaScript Modules in Your HTML App, provides a discussion on how to work directly with JavaScript modules in your Splunk App to further enhance functionality.
Chapter 8, Utilizing CSS to Spice Up Visual Appeal, discusses working directly with CSS files to manipulate the look and feel of a dashboard and move away from the standard Splunk color scheme.
Chapter 9, Moving Your App off Splunk with SplunkJS, provides an in-depth introduction to using SplunkJS to create standalone web applications with the use of Splunk data.
To be able to work along with the example applications created in this book, you will need to have the following items available:
A running version of Splunk Enterprise, preferably on Linux or Mac
Basic knowledge of Splunk and how it works, including creating searches and reports, indexing data, and knowledge of Web interface
A modern and stable web browser, such as Chrome or Firefox
A basic understanding of web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
Some basic knowledge of Python
An Internet connection
This book is designed to start from an overview of the Splunk Web framework and get an inexperienced Splunk user to work fast with hands-on examples. The examples build on top of each other to cover more advanced topics, so it is hoped that even an experienced Splunk developer will be able to get something out of this book as the chapters progress.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "By clicking on the Splunk logo at the top left of the screen, we are brought to the home page,
http://localhost:8000/en-GB/app/launcher/home
."
A block of code is set as follows:
1 <dashboard> 2 <label>SimpleXMLDashboard</label>
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
echo "# SplunkAppDev" >> README.md
New terms and important words are shown in bold.
For this book we have outlined the shortcuts for the Mac OX platform if you are using the Windows version you can find the relevant shortcuts on the WebStorm help page https://www.jetbrains.com/webstorm/help/keyboard-shortcuts-by-category.html.
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