Basic Searching in Splunk Enterprise
Summary
TLDRIn this Splunk Education video, Alex guides viewers through the basics of running searches in Splunk's Search & Reporting app. The tutorial covers navigating the app, using the search bar and time range picker, and exploring data through Table Views. The focus is on analyzing Apache server data from Buttercup Games to identify 503 errors. The video demonstrates how to refine searches with field-value pairs, wildcards, Boolean operators, and comparison operators. It also shows how to interact with events and fields to enhance searches and introduces commands for data visualization, such as stats and timechart. The video concludes with a call to action for further learning through Splunk's documentation and courses.
Takeaways
- 🔍 **Basic Searches in Splunk**: The video demonstrates how to perform basic searches in Splunk's Search & Reporting app.
- 📊 **Search Bar and Time Range Picker**: It introduces the search bar for entering queries and the time range picker to refine search results.
- 🕒 **Time Range Efficiency**: Emphasizes the importance of limiting searches by time for efficiency, highlighting 'Last 7 days' as an example.
- 🔎 **Search Assistant Features**: The script mentions the contextual matches, keyword completion, and syntax documentation provided by Splunk's search assistant.
- 📈 **Data Exploration with SPL**: It showcases using Splunk's Search Processing Language (SPL) to explore Apache server data from a fictional company.
- 🚫 **Filtering 503 Errors**: The video explains how to filter for specific HTTP status codes like 503 to identify server errors.
- 🔗 **Field-Value Pairs**: It teaches how to use field-value pairs to narrow down search results to specific events, such as HTTP status codes.
- 🌐 **Wildcards for Error Ranges**: Introduces the use of wildcards to search for a range of HTTP errors, like using '50*' to find errors in the 500 range.
- 🔄 **Boolean Operators**: The script covers the use of Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) to combine search terms and refine results.
- ✅ **Comparison Operators**: It explains the use of comparison operators (=, !=, <, <=, >, >=) to filter events based on specific conditions.
- 📝 **Phrase Searches**: Demonstrates searching for phrases by using quotes, ensuring that events contain the exact specified phrase.
- 🛠️ **Interactive Search Modification**: The video shows how to modify searches by interacting with event terms and fields directly within the interface.
- 📊 **Visualization Commands**: It introduces commands like 'stats' and 'timechart' for data transformation and visualization in Splunk.
- 📚 **Further Learning Resources**: The script concludes with suggestions for further learning, including Splunk documentation, videos, and educational courses.
Q & A
What is the purpose of Splunk's 'Search & Reporting' app?
-The 'Search & Reporting' app in Splunk is used to run searches on indexed data, view search results, and create reports or visualizations to explore and analyze data efficiently.
What does the Splunk search assistant provide when typing in the search bar?
-The search assistant offers contextual matches, keyword completions, and syntax documentation as you type in the search bar, helping users refine and understand their searches.
Why is limiting the time range in searches considered a best practice?
-Limiting the time range helps make searches more efficient by focusing on relevant data and reducing the amount of data Splunk needs to process, which speeds up results.
How can you narrow search results to HTTP status code 503 errors?
-You can narrow the results by specifying a field-value pair, such as `status=503`, to ensure only events with a status code of 503 are returned.
How do wildcards help in searches involving HTTP status codes?
-Wildcards, like replacing the last digit with an asterisk (e.g., `status=50*`), allow you to search for any status code that begins with '50', returning results for any server errors in the 500 range.
What happens if no Boolean operator is used between search terms?
-If no Boolean operator (like AND, OR) is used between search terms, Splunk automatically implies 'AND', meaning it searches for events containing both terms.
How can comparison operators be used in a Splunk search?
-Comparison operators such as `>`, `<`, `>=`, `!=` can be used to filter results based on conditions, such as finding events with a status greater than 400 (`status>400`).
What is the correct way to search for specific phrases in Splunk?
-To search for exact phrases, enclose the phrase in quotes. For example, to find events with the product name 'Dream Crusher', use `product_name="Dream Crusher"`.
What are the different ways you can interact with search results in Splunk?
-You can interact with search results by hovering over and clicking terms to add or remove them from your search, or by using the fields sidebar to add field-value pairs to refine the search.
How can you visualize search results in Splunk?
-You can visualize search results using commands like `stats` or `timechart`, and then select from different visualization styles such as column charts, with further formatting options available in the 'Format' and 'Trellis' menus.
Outlines
🔍 Introduction to Basic Searches in Splunk
In this section, Alex introduces the Splunk Search & Reporting app, highlighting its key components, including the search bar, time range picker, and various tools to manage searches. Alex demonstrates how to use Splunk's Search Processing Language (SPL) to explore Apache server data from Buttercup Games and troubleshoot 503 errors. The section emphasizes best practices, such as limiting searches by time to optimize performance, and introduces how Splunk's search assistant aids in refining searches.
🎮 Searching for Dream Crusher Events
This part explains how to search for specific events related to the video game 'Dream Crusher' using the product_name field in Splunk. Alex discusses the importance of using quotes to accurately search for phrases and demonstrates how to interact with highlighted search terms within events. Users can modify searches by adding, removing, or starting new searches from highlighted terms. Additionally, terms can be added from the fields sidebar, making the search process more intuitive and flexible.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Splunk
💡Search Processing Language (SPL)
💡Search & Reporting app
💡503 error
💡Field-value pair
💡Boolean operators
💡Timeline
💡Wildcard
💡Comparison operators
💡Visualization
Highlights
Introduction to running basic searches in Splunk's Search & Reporting app.
The app includes a search bar, time range picker, and field extraction sidebar for efficient data analysis.
Searching for a specific HTTP status code, such as 503 errors, by typing 503 in the search bar.
Using the time range picker to limit searches to the last 7 days for more efficient results.
Events returned include various matches for 503, not limited to HTTP status codes.
Refining results by using field-value pairs, like searching specifically for events with status=503.
Wildcards allow for broader searches, such as using 50* to capture all HTTP errors in the 500 range.
Boolean operators like AND, OR, and NOT can refine searches for more precise results.
Comparison operators like >, <, != can filter events based on numerical field values.
Phrases can be searched by wrapping terms in quotes, e.g., 'Dream Crusher' to find specific product data.
Clicking on highlighted text or field values adds them to the search query or starts a new search.
Splunk's Search Processing Language (SPL) enables transforming searches into visualizations and reports.
Appending the 'stats' command can summarize data, for instance, showing total sales by game title.
Using 'timechart' allows visualization of data trends over time, such as sales by day.
Visualization options include column charts and trellis layouts, providing split views of data for detailed analysis.
Transcripts
Hello! I'm Alex with Splunk Education.
Let's take a look at how to run basic searches
in Splunk's Search & Reporting app.
On the sidebar of the Splunk home page,
we select "Search & Reporting".
The app includes a search bar for entering our searches,
a time range picker for the search,
a menu to view and re-run past searches,
links to the search documentation and tutorial,
information on the data Splunk has indexed,
and an option to create Table Views,
which allow you to explore your data in a point-and-click interface.
In this demo, we'll be using Splunk's Search Processing Language
to explore Apache server data
from a fictional gaming company, Buttercup Games.
We want to see if 503 errors are occurring
on our Web servers, so we type 503 in the search bar.
As we type, the Splunk search assistant displays contextual matches,
keyword completion, and syntax documentation for the search.
We only want to see when an error happened
over the last seven days.
So we select "Last 7 days" in the time range picker.
Limiting search by time is key to getting more efficient results
and is a best practice to use for every search.
Once the time range is selected,
we click the search icon to send the search to Splunk.
The interface updates to show events that include the text "503",
a sidebar of fields that were extracted from the events,
and a timeline of when the events happened.
Since we searched for any event with the text "503",
events could include an HTTP status code,
an area code, a username,
even the name of a file in our data.
To limit the results to only see returned events
containing an HTTP status of 503,
we can search for a field-value pair.
In the fields sidebar, we see a field called status.
Clicking on the field name, we have links to quick reports,
values returned, and statistics for those values.
We change our search to use a field-value pair
by adding the case-sensitive field name to the value we want to find.
Now, only events with a status of 503 are returned.
To see all errors in the 500 range, we can use a wildcard.
Changing the last character to an asterisk will return any
HTTP error that begins in "50".
We can add additional terms to our search by
using the upper case Booleans and, or, and not.
To return results containing events with a status in the 500 range
or a 404 status we add "OR status=404" in our search.
This search bar includes syntax highlighting.
Here you can see the Boolean operator is colored orange,
making it easier to see what has been happening in our search.
If no Boolean is used between search terms, "AND" is implied.
The search returns no events, because Splunk is looking
for events with a status in the 500s and a 404 status.
We can also use the comparison operators of equal,
not equal, less than, less than or equal to,
greater than, or greater than or equal to in our search.
To see any events with a status greater than 400,
we add a "greater than" operator (>).
To exclude any events containing a status of 400 from our events,
we use the "not equal to" operator (!=).
To search for phrases, we can wrap the search terms in quotes.
To see all events related to our video game Dream Crusher,
we search the product_name field for the phrase "Dream Crusher".
If we remove the quotes,
no events will be returned.
This is because Splunk is searching for events
that contain both the product_name value
of "Dream" and the text "Crusher".
We can also modify our search by interacting with events.
As we roll over text in an event, terms are highlighted.
Clicking on a search term allows us to add it to the search,
remove it from the search,
or create a new search.
Clicking "Add to search" updates our search
to return only events that contain the selected term.
We can also add terms from the fields sidebar
by clicking the field name
and selecting the value we want to add to the search.
We can open a whole new world of monitoring and analyzing
by adding commands to our searches.
This search returns all successful purchases
from our web store over the last seven days.
Appending a stats command with the same function
and splitting our results by product name,
Splunk returns a table of our total sales by game title.
This transforming search also allows us
to visualize the data in a column chart.
Or, we can use a timechart command
to see how our products have been selling by day.
Clicking on "Column Chart" opens the visualization menu,
where we can select a different visualization style.
The Format menu provides additional visual formatting options,
while the Trellis layout allows us
to split our visualization by a selected field,
creating multiple visualizations while running only one search.
We have just scratched the surface of Splunk's Search Processig Language.
We suggest you check out the documentation,
watch additional videos on the Splunk How-To channel,
and register for courses from Splunk Education.
Thanks for watching!
Посмотреть больше похожих видео
5.0 / 5 (0 votes)