Practical applications of Splunk's SDK

In this chapter, we will show you how you can extract data from Splunk and display it externally through a web server without the need to log in to Splunk. This is extremely useful when the use case demands a real-time dashboard that is publicly displayed within your organization and that does not require logging in to Splunk.

To achieve this, we will use the Splunk SDK to extract the data from Splunk using a Node.js cron job and dump the payload into JSON files. A cron job involves the cron expressions we learned about in Chapter 5, Data Optimization, Reports, Alerts, and Accelerating Searches, which allow the developer to schedule alerts and other processes very precisely. The term payload is frequently used in computer programming to represent what the person receiving the output from the program is most interested in. The JSON files, which are files based on key-value pairs, will be served by a static web server. We will then create an HTML page...