Splunk Search Command Series: dbinspect

 

 

The power of Splunk comes from the insights we pull from our data. And to emphasize… I mean searchable data. Now, Splunk isn’t perfect and neither is your data. Data can be corrupt, go missing, or frankly, live in the dark. Pull that data back into the light and ensure your data is intact by using dbinspect.

What is dbinspect? The Splunk search command, dbinspect, allows us to look at the information of buckets that make up a specified index.  If you’re using Splunk Enterprise, this search command shows you where your data lives so you can optimize your disk space.

How to Use dbinspect

Let’s break down the command:  

|dbinspect index=<index_name> timeformat=<time format> 

Check out what this looks like in Splunk:  

 

The above screenshot may look small as it doesn’t capture all of the fields, but, the fields we DO see provide us with a wealth of information. When you use the command, you’ll have access to view all of the fields we can’t see in the screenshot.

 

Here’s what we can see with dbinspect: 

How many events are in a bucket 

The file path of the bucket 

Which index the bucket belongs too 

 

dbinspect also tells us: 

The state of the bucket (hot/warm/cold) 

When the bucket was created 

The size of the bucket in mb 

And tsidx states (full, fulling, etc) 

 

And that’s it. Use dbinspect to get insights into your data buckets. We’ve got plenty of searches to come this month, stay tuned!

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