Consolidating search apps

Consolidating search apps starts to come in handy when we want to begin to develop the ever-elusive single pane of glass. There is usually a very large amount of data gathered in Splunk, though many people create disparate apps for a unique purpose. Take for instance a Network app that has all router/firewall/switch logs, and then an Active Directory app that has all Microsoft Active Directory data, as well as a Juniper SRX app in order to pay attention to the Quality Assurance environment. While these provide value to a user, the visualization often gets cumbersome on login as you have logs of different apps and titles to sift through to find the data you want to see. App consolidation is a great way to make everything available with a single click, and then a user just navigates to the appropriate set of dashboards.

Creating a custom app

To begin the consolidation process, it's best to start by creating a custom app. The process is quite easy, and there...