Practical Splunk Search Processing Language

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xxi

   PDF

2. Introducing the Splunk Platform

   • Karun Subramanian

   Pages 1-38

3. Calculating Statistics

   • Karun Subramanian

   Pages 39-79

4. Using Time-Related Operations

   • Karun Subramanian

   Pages 81-111

5. Grouping and Correlating

   • Karun Subramanian

   Pages 113-139

6. Working with Fields

   • Karun Subramanian

   Pages 141-176

7. Using Lookups

   • Karun Subramanian

   Pages 177-191

8. Advanced SPL Commands

   • Karun Subramanian

   Pages 193-221

9. Less-Common Yet Impactful SPL Commands

   • Karun Subramanian

   Pages 223-242

10. Optimizing SPL

    • Karun Subramanian

    Pages 243-261

11. Back Matter

    Pages 263-268

    PDF

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 fieldsand 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

• Operational Data Intelligence
• Querying Machine Data
• Machine Learning
• Learn Splunk
• Splunk Search Processing Language
• Create dashboards in Splunk
• Machine Data
• Splunk
• Splunk SPL
• Splunk query language
• Splunk performance tuning
• How to write Splunk queries
• Create reports in Splunk

• Greater Minneapolis, USA

  Karun Subramanian

​Karun Subramanian is an IT operations expert and a Splunk certified architect. He is committed to helping IT organizations implement world-class observability by making use of machine-generated data. His IT career has spanned more than two decades, ranging from systems administrator to software engineer to IT director. Possessing deep expertise of the Splunk platform, he has assisted teams to solve complex problems in the area of DevOps, security, and business analytics. He has worked in engineering roles for firms including Wells Fargo Bank, Express Scripts, Federal Reserve Bank, and Optum.

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