Practical Splunk Search Processing Language

Book excerpt: Use this practical guide to the Splunk operational data intelligence platform to search, visualize, and analyze petabyte-scale, unstructured machine data. Get to the heart of the platform and use the Search Processing Language (SPL) tool to query the platform to find the answers you need. With more than 140 commands, SPL gives you the power to ask any question of machine data. However, many users (both newbies and experienced users) find the language difficult to grasp and complex. This book takes you through the basics of SPL using plenty of hands-on examples and emphasizes the most impactful SPL commands (such as eval, stats, and timechart). You will understand the most efficient ways to query Splunk (such as learning the drawbacks of subsearches and join, and why it makes sense to use tstats). You will be introduced to lesser-known commands that can be very useful, such as using the command rex to extract fields and erex to generate regular expressions automatically. In addition, you will learn how to create basic visualizations (such as charts and tables) and use prescriptive guidance on search optimization. For those ready to take it to the next level, the author introduces advanced commands such as predict, kmeans, and cluster. What You Will Learn Use real-world scenarios (such as analyzing a web access log) to search, group, correlate, and create reports using SPL commands Enhance your search results using lookups and create new lookup tables using SPL commands Extract fields from your search results Compare data from multiple time frames in one chart (such as comparing your current day application performance to the average of the past 30 days) Analyze the performance of your search using Job Inspector and identify execution costs of various components of your search Who This Book Is For Application developers, architects, DevOps engineers, application support engineers, network operations center analysts, security operations center (SOC) analysts, and cyber security professionals who use Splunk to search and analyze their machine data