Writing commands

To augment the built-in commands, Splunk provides the ability to write commands in Python and Perl. You can write the commands to modify events, replace events, or even dynamically produce events.

When not to write a command

While external commands can be very useful, if the number of events to be processed is large, or if performance is a concern, it should be considered a last resort. You should make every effort to accomplish the task at hand using the search language built into Splunk, or other built-in features. For instance, if you need:

• Regular expressions—learn to use rex, regex, and extracted fields

• To calculate a new field, or modify an existing field—look into eval (search for splunk eval functions with your favorite search engine)

• To augment your results with external data—learn to use lookups , which can also be a script, if need be

• To read external data that changes periodically—consider using inputcsv

The performance issues introduced by external commands come from...