Splunk Essentials

A fast-paced and practical guide to demystifying big data and transforming it into operational intelligenceAbout This Book Want to get started with Splunk to analyze and visualize machine data? Open this book and step into the world of Splunk. Leverage the exceptional analysis and visualization capabilities to make informed decisions for your business This easy-to-follow, practical book can be used by anyone, even if you have never managed any data beforeWho This Book Is For This book will be perfect for you if you are a Software engineer or developer or System administrators or Business analyst who seek to correlate machine data with business metrics and provide intuitive real-time and statistical visualizations. Some knowledge or experience of previous versions of Splunk will be helpful but not essential. What You Will Learn Install and configure Splunk Gather data from different sources, isolate them by indexes, classify them into source types, and tag them with the essential fields Be comfortable with the Search Processing Language and get to know the best practices in writing search queries Create stunning and powerful dashboards Be proactive by implementing alerts and scheduled reports Use the Splunk SDK and integrate Splunk data into other applications Implement the best practices in using Splunk. In Detail Splunk is a search, analysis, and reporting platform for machine data, which has a high adoption on the market. More and more organizations want to adopt Splunk to use their data to make informed decisions. This book is for anyone who wants to manage data with Splunk. You'll start with very basics of Splunk-- installing Splunk--and then move on to searching machine data with Splunk. You will gather data from different sources, isolate them by indexes, classify them into source types, and tag them with the essential fields. After this, you will learn to create various reports, XML forms, and alerts. You will then continue using the Pivot Model to transform the data models into visualization. You will also explore visualization with D3 in Splunk. Finally you'll be provided with some real-world best practices in using Splunk. Style and approach This fast-paced, example-rich guide will help you analyze and visualize machine data with Splunk through simple, practical instructions.

Cover; Copyright; Credits; About the Author; About the Reviewers; www.PacktPub.com; Table of Contents; Preface; Chapter 1: Introducing Splunk; How to install Splunk; Splunk setup instructions; Setting up Splunk for Windows; Splunk for Mac; Starting up Splunk; The functions of Splunk; Splunk and big data; The three Vs; Other big data descriptors; Splunk data sources; Understanding events, event types, and fields in Splunk; Events; Event types; Sourcetypes; Fields; Getting data into Splunk; Summary; Chapter 2: An Introduction to Indexing and Searching; Collecting data to search.

Indexing data with SplunkUsing indexed data; Viewing a list of indexes; Bringing in indexed data; Specifying a sourcetype; What is Search Processing Language (SPL)?; Using pipes when processing data with Splunk; Types of SPL commands; Filter commands; The sort command; The grouping command; Reporting commands; Other commands; How to perform simple searches; Summary; Chapter 3: More on Using Search; More on search; Doing a count; Creating a count broken down by field values; Other stat functions; Using the eval command; Combining stats with eval; Using the timechart command; Visualizations.

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