Writing commands

To augment the built-in commands, Splunk provides the ability to write commands in Python and Perl. You can write commands to modify events, replace events, and 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 want to accomplish any of the following tasks, make sure you know what to do, which is what is discussed here:

• To use 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...