Querying Splunk via REST

Splunk provides an extensive HTTP REST interface, which allows searching, adding data, adding inputs, managing users, and more. Documentation and SDKs are provided by Splunk at http://dev.splunk.com/.

To get an idea of how this REST interaction happens, let's walk through a sample conversation to run a query and retrieve the results. The steps are essentially as follows:

1. Start the query (POST)
2. Poll for status (GET)
3. Retrieve results (GET)

We will use the command-line program curl to illustrate these steps. The SDKs make this interaction much simpler.

The command to start a query is as follows:

curl -u user:pass -k https://yourserver:8089/services/search/jobs -
 d"search=search query"

This essentially says to use POST on the search=search query. If you are familiar with HTTP, you might notice that this is a standard POST from an HTML form.

To run the query earliest=-1h index="_internal" warn | stats count by host, we need to URL-encode the query. The command, then, is as follows...