How Do Users Most Commonly Get Lost in Splunk?

When have you been lost in Splunk? We’ve all been there.

In some cases, you’re trying to clean up your data ingest and track down the status of your forwarders. In others, you’re trying to decipher Splunk’s Search Processing Language (SPL) and can’t figure out how to get to the data you need. Then, there’s the constant maintenance, research, and manual hours needed to keep Splunk running efficiently.

Splunk is a journey and, needless to say, most of us have felt a little lost along the way. That’s why we asked our own Kinney Group Splunk experts this question:

 

 

How do users most commonly get lost in Splunk?

 

 

“Practically all my customers thus far don’t know how to use SPL or get data onboarded. They love it after they get that figured out.”

 

“Slow and inefficient searches are often seen reducing deployment or an instance. Additionally, large numbers of scheduled searches often take a toll on performance. Small tweaks can be made to vastly improve searching, however come with much practice.”

 

“Splunk itself is vast and hard enough to learn, however mastering Splunk requires knowledge of SPL, networking, python scripting, regex, XML, Active Directory, AWS etc.”

 

“Logging containerized services. Using the Splunk Syslog Driver for Docker has increased pain-points when bringing in docker logs. This has been a big issue for one of my customers”

 

 

“I would say that a question I get often in Splunk is ‘How do I find my data dictionary?’ This is equivalent to how do I find all my fields and tables in a database. Because Splunk is SO versatile, sometimes it is hard to know where to begin your search as a newbie to Splunk.”

 

“I think one of the most difficult situations with Splunk is not understanding which configurations are actively affecting data ingest and parsing, and where those configurations are located. You can troubleshoot this on the CLI, but that’s inconvenient when you only have access to the Splunk UI. This confusion leads to lengthy trial and error configuration changes to resolve data format issues.”

 

“Data onboarding with unstructured logs or sourcetypes can be difficult as an intermediate knowledge of regex is often needed to accurately parse these events.”

 

To sum it up, Splunk is hard.

New features, updated products and interfaces, premium apps — when you’re navigating your Splunk journey, it’s easy to get lost. In the 17 year history of Splunk, there’s never been a single solution that removes the roadblocks, provides a clear path forward, and helps you navigate your journey with Splunk. Until now…

 

We have a big announcement. 

We’d love for you to join us Tuesday, November 10 at 1 PM EST.