In Splunk Essentials, Second Edition, we have added many more features that readers should find useful. Splunk Enterprise Software, or Splunk, is an extremely powerful tool for searching, exploring, and visualizing data of all types. Splunk is becoming increasingly popular, as more and more businesses, both large and small, discover its ease and usefulness. Analysts, managers, students, and others can quickly learn how to use the data from their systems, networks, web traffic, and social media to make attractive and informative reports. This is a straightforward, practical, and quick introduction to Splunk that should have you making reports and gaining insights from your data in no time. We have added a number of helpful hints and exercises that will help you get up to speed with Splunk in no time. Throughout the book, we have provided step-by-step instructions, pointers, and illustrations to help you on your way.
Chapter 1, Splunk in Action, introduces you to Splunk Enterprise Software and its powerful capabilities.
Chapter 2, Bringing in Data, explains indexing and searching in Splunk, and introduces other data concepts that are important to understand.
Chapter 3, Search Processing Language, develops your skills in using Search Processing Language (SPL).
Chapter 4, Data Models and Pivot, shows you how to create a data model as well as a pivot table using Splunk.
Chapter 5, Data Optimization, Reports, Alerts, and Accelerating Searches, explores how to use data optimization and search acceleration with Splunk, and how to create effective reports and alerts.
Chapter 6, Panes of Glass, takes you step-by-step through the development of dashboard.
Chapter 7, Splunk SDK for JavaScript and D3.js, instructs you on how to use a Splunk SDK and D3 to create effective and attractive website visualizations.
Chapter 8, HTTP Event Collector, introduces how to use Splunk to monitor HTTP events.
Chapter 9, Best Practices and Advanced Queries, overviews various best practices for using Splunk and gives details on advanced queries that can be used to take advantage of Splunk’s many rich capabilities.
Most personal computers today can run Splunk easily. For more technical details see http://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/6.4/Installation/Chooseyourplatform.
Splunk Essentials, Second Edition, is intended for the Splunk developer, software engineer, businessperson, analyst, or student who wants to quickly learn how to use Splunk to manage data. Perhaps you have heard about this technology that is being used quite often now in fields like systems analysis, cyber security, and machine data management. In a matter of hours, this book will help you understand how to bring in data of all types, store it, and use it to create effective reports and dashboards. It would be helpful to have a bit of familiarity with basic computer concepts, but no prior experience is required.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "It is essentially a
collection of databases that is, by default, located at $SPLUNK_HOME/var/lib/splunk."
A block of code is set as follows:
[wineventlogs] coldPath = $SPLUNK_DB\wineventlogs\colddb homePath = $SPLUNK_DB\wineventlogs\db maxTotalDataSizeMB = 100 thawedPath = $SPLUNK_DB\wineventlogs\thaweddb
Any command-line input or output is written as in two ways in this book. Be careful when copying commands with quotation marks. It is best to type in the entire search command to avoid problems.
If it is a Windows command, the command will be written as follows:
C:\> notepad c:\splunk\etc\apps\destinations\local\indexes.conf
If it is a Splunk command, the command will be written as follows:
SPL> index=main /booking/confirmation earliest=-24h@h | timechart count span=15m
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Underneath Selected Fields, you will see Interesting Fields."
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