Splunk is a very popular Big Data Analytics tool used to monitor, search, analyze, and visualize large amounts of machine data. In simple words, Splunk is a tool to process and extract insight from a large amount of machine data. Splunk is an advanced technology that is having widespread application in a variety of fields. Splunk searches through log files that are stored in a system.
Splunk helps in operational intelligence which is a category of real-time business analytics that delivers insights into streaming events, business operations, and data. Splunk is extremely efficient, scalable, and reliable, as a cloud application. Learn Splunk by enrolling in a popular Splunk certification course. So let’s now use Splunk as a tool to help you get a better understanding.
Top 10 uses of Splunk
Here we will discuss the top uses of Splunk in detail.
Search Processing Language
It’s a powerful tool that allows its users to search easily. Splunk, as we discussed earlier, is extremely efficient in allowing users to inspect large amounts of data and perform statistical operations. For example, you want to know which applications are the slowest to start up and thus are making users wait longer. Searching in Splunk is easy when you type in the required command. For the above example, type in the following commands:
index=uberagent sourcetype=uberAgent:Process:ProcessStartup | timechart avg(StartupTimeMs) by Name
Once you execute this command, it will provide the exact results that you need without spending more time. It’s what makes the Splunk tool very effective.
Splunk offers various Data Sources, Apps, Add-ons.
Splunk users can find out the duration every application is taking to get started by collecting data from different sources. These accepted data sources are many like log files, Syslog, Windows event logs, SNMP, etc. Using Splunk, you just need to write a script and execute it. If you are unable to find what you are looking for, integrate an add-on named Splunk App Directory. This add-on will help in collecting all necessary data. The data from these different data sources may be completely different. Splunk apps can be data inputs that provide dashboards.
Index and Events
One of the best things about Splunk is that it readily accepts all data immediately after installation since it doesn’t have any fixed schema. Nearly every log format is recognized, and others can be specified in configuration files. Splunk users can index any kind of data present in the system. After indexing, Splunk processes incoming data and prepares it for storage. Data is segregated, and streams of characters are created as events.
Splunk is scalable and doesn’t possess any backend.
With Splunk, there isn’t any backend or database to set up or maintain. It allows Splunk to be installed much more easily and quickly. It means that data is spread across distributed systems which means there’s no single point of failure.
Splunk helps even in reporting and alerting
Splunk helps in generating a variety of reports like graphs, bar charts, pie charts, etc. It helps in capturing everything from statistics to frequencies to correlations in a report. Every report prepared using Splunk will have a dashboard and provide the users with many options for customizing and bringing out much-needed data. Splunk also features an alerting mechanism that helps in log management.
Splunk makes monitoring and diagnosis easy.
DevOps has made it very difficult in checking the underlying infrastructure and to quickly identify the root cause of the matter. Splunk provides visibility for the performance of the system and helps the customer to find the real problem and discover trends. Monitoring becomes much easier by indexing.
Splunk makes troubleshooting easy.
Splunk stores all the log files, which makes it easy to troubleshoot any issues. Splunk supports many configurations, but figuring out which configuration is running is difficult. There are tools that will help in identifying which configuration is running.
Splunk helps in analyzing system performance.
Splunk users can monitor servers or Windows infrastructure. Performance monitoring covers dashboards for CPU, Physical, Logical Disk, Memory, System metrics, Network Interface metrics. It provides users with a dropdown having text boxes where you can click and enter the required text.
Splunk features dashboards to visualize and analyze results.
Splunk has all the capabilities in creating different dashboards that help manage systems better. Splunk provides different metrics and a different dashboard. Which results in neatly segregating the data and eventually helps in managing it.
Splunk helps in storing and retrieving data
Splunk uses indexing and events to store data which in turn helps in accessing data anytime. You can search it and fetch it from logs with ease.
Conclusion
As you read here in this blog, Splunk is the perfect tool that will help in monitoring different infrastructure performances, creating dashboards, reports, troubleshooting issues, etc. Splunk is a very effective and efficient tool in storing all machine data in logs which then helps in managing systems.
