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You're reading from  Advanced Splunk

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Published inJun 2016
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ISBN-139781785884351
Edition1st Edition
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Ashish Kumar Tulsiram Yadav
Ashish Kumar Tulsiram Yadav
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Ashish Kumar Tulsiram Yadav

Ashish Kumar Tulsiram Yadav is a BE in computers and has around four and a half years of experience in software development, data analytics, and information security, and around four years of experience in Splunk application development and administration. He has experience of creating Splunk applications and add-ons, managing Splunk deployments, machine learning using R and Python, and analytics and visualization using various tools, such as Tableau and QlikView. He is currently working with the information security operations team, handling the Splunk Enterprise security and cyber security of the organization. He has worked as a senior software engineer at Larsen & Toubro Technology Services in the telecom consumer electronics and semicon unit providing data analytics on a wide variety of domains, such as mobile devices, telecom infrastructure, embedded devices, Internet of Things (IOT), Machine to Machine (M2M), entertainment devices, and network and storage devices. He has also worked in the area of information, network, and cyber security in his previous organization. He has experience in OMA LWM2M for device management and remote monitoring of IOT and M2M devices and is well versed in big data and the Hadoop ecosystem. He is a passionate ethical hacker, security enthusiast, and Linux expert and has knowledge of Python, R, .NET, HTML5, CSS, and the C language. He is an avid blogger and writes about ethical hacking and cyber security on his blogs in his free time. He is a gadget freak and keeps on writing reviews on various gadgets he owns. He has participated in and has been a winner of hackathons, technical paper presentations, white papers, and so on.
Read more about Ashish Kumar Tulsiram Yadav

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Chapter 9. Advanced Dashboard Customization

You learned various dashboard customization techniques in the previous chapter. Now, you will learn some of the advanced dashboard customization techniques that will help you develop highly dynamic, customizable, and useful dashboards over data on Splunk. The dynamic and customized dashboard delivers valuable analytics and visualization.

We will cover the following topics along with examples and implementation procedures in this chapter:

  • Layout customization

  • Image overlay

  • Custom alert action

  • Custom look and feel

Layout customization


The Splunk dashboard has the option of dragging and dropping panels from controls. Splunk automatically resizes the panel equally as per the number of panels in a row. Now, you will learn to customize the dashboard panel's width and group more than one visualization in a single panel.

Panel width

Let's first understand the need for customizing panel width explicitly when Splunk automatically resizes the panel by itself with the help of an example.

Example

In the following figure, there are three panels in a single row. Panel 1 has Statistical Table, Panel 2 has Line Chart, and Panel 3 has Single Value. Splunk's smart dashboard capability automatically resizes each panel of equal sizes in a row. In the following example, it can be seen that Panel 3 has very less information to display, whereas Panel 2 requires more space to display information properly and efficiently:

Hence, in order to make the dashboard display the required information efficiently, such as the panel that...

Custom look and feel


In this section, you will learn how to use custom CSS and JS to customize the look and feel of Splunk dashboards. In the previous topics and chapter, we used CSS and JS to customize the functionality of the dashboard. In this section, we will modify the look and feel (aesthetics) of the Splunk dashboard.

The Splunk dashboard has its predefined stylesheets, which are automatically applied on any new dashboards created in Splunk. You will now learn how to override the default stylesheet behavior with your own custom CSS file.

Example and implementation

The following steps are required to use custom CSS file on any dashboard XML page:

  1. Create a CSS file (say, layout.css) at $SPLUNK_HOME$\etc\apps\app_name\appserver\static.

  2. Go to the Splunk Web Console | Dashboard | Edit Source (for which the custom layout is to be applied).

  3. Direct the dashboard to use custom CSS file by modifying the XML code as follows:

    <dashboard stylesheet="layout.css">

    If the dashboard has a form tag,...

The custom alert action


The Splunk dashboard can be configured to implement custom alerting actions. Splunk can be integrated with other enterprise applications to automate the workflow and thus increase efficiency.

What is alerting?

Splunk is a big data tool with lots of data streaming in every second from numerous different sources, and there can be multiple dashboards and use case scenarios implemented on Splunk. It would be difficult to keep monitoring all the dashboards for any issue when it arises in real time. Hence, whenever any specific condition is met, an alert can be sent in the form of an e-mail, SMS, or chat notification informing the admin that the defined condition has been found on the data.

Thus, the feature of alerting in Splunk helps to avoid monitoring of the dashboard live and 24 x 7 for issues and thus reduces manpower. Since the process is automated, there will not be a single instance when the specific issue is caused and not reported. Thus, the alerting feature increases...

Summary


In this chapter, we saw various advanced dashboard customization techniques, which can be used on the Splunk dashboard. The customization methods learned in this chapter can be applied to build useful, highly functional, and dynamic dashboards on Splunk. Now, we will see how various tweaks and techniques can be used on Splunk to utilize its features efficiently. You will learn about a few features and tweaks of Splunk that can help us make quality analytics and visualizations.

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Author (1)

author image
Ashish Kumar Tulsiram Yadav

Ashish Kumar Tulsiram Yadav is a BE in computers and has around four and a half years of experience in software development, data analytics, and information security, and around four years of experience in Splunk application development and administration. He has experience of creating Splunk applications and add-ons, managing Splunk deployments, machine learning using R and Python, and analytics and visualization using various tools, such as Tableau and QlikView. He is currently working with the information security operations team, handling the Splunk Enterprise security and cyber security of the organization. He has worked as a senior software engineer at Larsen & Toubro Technology Services in the telecom consumer electronics and semicon unit providing data analytics on a wide variety of domains, such as mobile devices, telecom infrastructure, embedded devices, Internet of Things (IOT), Machine to Machine (M2M), entertainment devices, and network and storage devices. He has also worked in the area of information, network, and cyber security in his previous organization. He has experience in OMA LWM2M for device management and remote monitoring of IOT and M2M devices and is well versed in big data and the Hadoop ecosystem. He is a passionate ethical hacker, security enthusiast, and Linux expert and has knowledge of Python, R, .NET, HTML5, CSS, and the C language. He is an avid blogger and writes about ethical hacking and cyber security on his blogs in his free time. He is a gadget freak and keeps on writing reviews on various gadgets he owns. He has participated in and has been a winner of hackathons, technical paper presentations, white papers, and so on.
Read more about Ashish Kumar Tulsiram Yadav