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Splunk 7 Essentials, Third Edition
Splunk 7 Essentials, Third Edition

Splunk 7 Essentials, Third Edition: Demystify machine data by leveraging datasets, building reports, and sharing powerful insights , Third Edition

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Profile Icon J-P Contreras Profile Icon Steven Koelpin Profile Icon Erickson Delgado Profile Icon Betsy Page Sigman
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Splunk 7 Essentials, Third Edition

Bringing in Data

Computerized systems are responsible for much of the data produced on a daily basis. Splunk Enterprise makes it easy to get data from many of these systems. This data is frequently referred to as machine data. And since machines mostly generate data in an ongoing or streaming nature, Splunk is especially useful as it can handle streaming data easily and efficiently.

In addition to capturing machine data, Splunk Enterprise allows you, as the user, to enhance and enrich the data either as it is stored or as it is searched. Machine data can be enriched with business rules and logic for enhanced searching capabilities. Often it is combined with traditional row/column data to provide business context to machine data with data such a product hierarchies.

In this chapter, you will learn about Splunk and how it relates to a often used term - big data, as well as the most...

Splunk and big data

Big data is a widely used term but, as is often the case, one that means different things to different people. In this part of the chapter, we present common characteristics of big data .

There is no doubt that today there is a lot of data, and more commonly today, the term big data is not meant to reference the volume as much as it is characterized by other factors, including variability so wide that legacy, conventional organizational data systems cannot consume and produce analytics from it.

Streaming data

Streaming data is almost always being generated, with a timestamp associated to each entry. Splunk's inherent ability to monitor and track data loaded from ever growing log files, or accept data...

Splunk data sources

Splunk was invented as a way to keep track of and analyze machine data coming from a variety of computerized systems. It is a powerful platform for doing just that. But since its invention, it has been used for a myriad of different data types, including streaming log data, database and spreadsheet data, and data provided by web services. The various types of data that Splunk is often used for are explained in the next few sections.

Machine data

As mentioned previously, much of Splunk's data capability is focused on machine data. Machine data is data created each time a machine does something, even if it is as seemingly insignificant as a successful user login. Each event has information about its...

Creating indexes

Indexes are where Splunk Enterprise stores all the data it has processed. It is essentially a collection of databases that are, by default, located at $SPLUNK_HOME/var/lib/splunk. Before data can be searched, it needs to be indexed—a process we describe here.

Tip from the Fez: There are a variety of intricate settings which can be manipulated to control size and data management aspects of an index. We will not cover those in this book, however as your situation requires complexity, be sure to consider a variety of topics around index management, such as overall size, buckets parameters, archiving and other optimization settings.

There are two ways to create an index, through the Splunk user interface or by creating an indexes.conf file. You will be shown here how to create an index using the Splunk portal, but you should realize that when you do that...

Buckets

You may have noticed that there is a certain pattern in this configuration file, in which folders are broken into three locations: coldPath, homePath, and thawedPath. This is a very important concept in Splunk. An index contains compressed raw data and associated index files which are spread out into age-designated directories. Each age-designated directory is called a bucket.

A bucket moves through several stages as it ages. In general, as your data gets older (think colder) in the system, it is pushed to the next bucket. And, as you can see in the following list, the thawed bucket contains data that has been restored from an archive. Here is a breakdown of the buckets in relation to each other:

  • hot: This is newly indexed data and open for writing (hotPath)
  • warm: This is data rolled from the hot bucket with no active writing (warmPath)
  • cold: This is data rolled from...

Log files as data input

As mentioned earlier in this chapter, any configuration you make in the Splunk portal corresponds to a *.conf file written under the $SPLUNK_HOME directory. The same goes for the creation of data inputs; adding data inputs using the Splunk user interface creates a file called inputs.conf.

For this exercise use the windows_perfmon_logs.txt file provided in the Chapter 2/samples.

Now that you have an index to store Windows logs, let's create a data input for it, with the following steps:

  1. Go to the Splunk home page.
  2. Click on your Destinations app. Make sure you are in the Destinations app before you execute the next steps, or your configuration changes won't be isolated to your application.
  3. In the Splunk navigation bar, select Settings.
  1. Under the Data section, click on Data inputs.
  2. On the Data inputs page, click on Files & directories.
  3. In...

Splunk events and fields

All throughout this chapter, you have been running Splunk search queries that have returned data. It is important to understand what events and fields are before we go any further, for an understanding of these is essential to comprehending what happens when you run Splunk on the data.

In Splunk, data is classified into events and is like a record, such as a log file entry or other type of input data. An event can have many different attributes or fields or just a few. When you run a successful search query, you will see events returned from the Splunk indexes the search is being run against. If you are looking at live streaming data, events can come in very quickly through Splunk.

Every event is given a number of default fields. For a complete listing, go to http://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/6.3.2/Data/Aboutdefaultfields. We will now go through...

Extracting new fields

Most raw data that you will encounter will have some form of structure. Just like a CSV (comma-separated value) file or a web log file, it is assumed that each entry in the log corresponds to some sort of format. Splunk makes custom field extraction very easy, especially for delimited files. Let's take the case of our Eventgen data and look at the following example. By design, the raw data generated by Eventgen is delimited by commas. Following is a example of a raw event:

2018-01-18 21:19:20:013632, 130.253.37.97,GET,/destination/PML/details,-,80,- 10.2.1.33,Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J3 Safari/6533.18.5,301,0,0,317,1514 

Since there is a distinct separation of fields in this data, we can use Splunk's field extraction capabilities to automatically classify...

Summary

In this chapter, we began learning about big data and its related characteristics, such as streaming data, analytical data latency, and sparseness. We also covered the types of data that can be brought into Splunk. We then created an index and loaded a sample log file, all while examining the configuration file (.conf) entries made at the file system level. We talked about what fields and events are. And finally, we saw how to extract fields from events and name them so that they can be more useful to us.

In the chapters to come, we'll learn more about these important features of Splunk.

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Key benefits

  • • Analyze and visualize machine data to step into the world of Splunk!
  • • Leverage the exceptional analysis and visualization capabilities to make informed decisions for your business
  • • This easy-to-follow, practical book can be used by anyone - even if you have never managed data before

Description

Splunk is a search, reporting, and analytics software platform for machine data, which has an ever-growing market adoption rate. More organizations than ever are adopting Splunk to make informed decisions in areas such as IT operations, information security, and the Internet of Things. The first two chapters of the book will get you started with a simple Splunk installation and set up of a sample machine data generator, called Eventgen. After this, you will learn to create various reports, dashboards, and alerts. You will also explore Splunk's Pivot functionality to model data for business users. You will then have the opportunity to test-drive Splunk's powerful HTTP Event Collector. After covering the core Splunk functionality, you'll be provided with some real-world best practices for using Splunk, and information on how to build upon what you've learned in this book. Throughout the book, there will be additional comments and best practice recommendations from a member of the SplunkTrust Community, called "Tips from the Fez".

Who is this book for?

This book is for the beginners who want to get well versed in the services offered by Splunk 7. If you want to be a data/business analyst or want to be a system administrator, this book is what you want. No prior knowledge of Splunk is required.

What you will learn

  • Install and configure Splunk for personal use
  • • Store event data in Splunk indexes, classify events into sources, and add
  • data fields
  • • Learn essential Splunk Search Processing Language commands
  • and best practices
  • • Create powerful real-time or user-input dashboards
  • • Be proactive by implementing alerts and scheduled reports
  • • Tips from the Fez: best practices using Splunk features and add-ons
  • • Understand security and deployment considerations for taking Splunk to an organizational level
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Language : English
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Table of Contents

9 Chapters
Splunk – Getting Started Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Bringing in Data Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Search Processing Language Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Reporting, Alerts, and Search Optimization Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Dynamic Dashboarding Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Data Models and Pivot Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
HTTP Event Collector Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Best Practices and Advanced Queries Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Taking Splunk to the Organization Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

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D wooden Jul 25, 2018
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Great book!
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Brent Breithaupt Apr 06, 2018
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I highly recommend buying this book if you are genuinely interested in learning Splunk and leveraging it in your organization. Not only did it teach me the fundamentals, but more importantly learning best practices and the key considerations for taking Splunk to drive value to my constituents. I feel it provided me the knowledge and confidence to make use of it effectively.
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Alejandro Castillo Jul 16, 2018
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
I was placed in a hot seat where I needed to know Splunk quickly, so I read the description and purchased the book. Little did I know it carried the Splunk fundamentals 1 & 2 information in this book. So I read it and passed the certified user user and I look forward to passing the certified Splunk power user soon.During my study I even had a few questions so I messaged the author on LinkedIn and he was more than willing to help out. Overall I’m very impressed in the material completeness and I couldn’t be happier knowing I have somewhere to turn to should I have questions :)
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D G Onyeadiri Aug 29, 2018
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Just bought this book this month. The book is an awesome book to learn Splunk. The book is well written and easy to read and understand. I highly recommend it for anyone trying to learn Splunk.
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Katia Apr 13, 2018
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Great book!
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