The machine data that facilitates operational intelligence comes in many different forms and from many different sources. Splunk can collect and index data from several sources, including log files written by web servers or business applications, syslog data streaming in from network devices, or the output of custom developed scripts. Even data that looks complex at first can be easily collected, indexed, transformed, and presented back to you in real time.
This chapter will walk you through the basic recipes that will act as the building blocks to get the data you want into Splunk. The chapter will further serve as an introduction to the sample data sets that we will use to build our own operational intelligence Splunk app. The datasets will be coming from a hypothetical three-tier e-commerce web application and will contain web server logs, application logs, and...
