Getting familiar with Splunk – a brief introduction

Are you getting started with your journey towards Splunk ? or are you in the early stages in the Splunk learning path ? If your answer is ‘yes’, this post is for you. We will be uncovering some of the very basics about Splunk in this post.

Splunk is a software used to search and analyse machine data. This machine data can come from web applications, sensors, devices or any data created by user. It serves the needs of IT infrastructure by analysing the logs generated in various processes but it can also analyse any structured or semi-structured data with proper data modelling. Splunk performs capturing, indexing, and correlating the real time data in a searchable container and produces graphs, alerts, dashboards and visualisations. Splunk provides easy to access data over the whole organisation for easy diagnostics and solutions to various business problems.

Let’s dive into the details..

Product categories

Splunk is available in three different product categories as follows −

Splunk Enterprise − It is used by companies which have large IT infrastructure and IT driven business. It helps in gathering and analysing the data from websites, applications, devices and sensors, etc.

Splunk Cloud − It is the cloud hosted platform with same features as the enterprise version. It can be availed from Splunk itself or through the AWS cloud platform.

Splunk Light − It allows search, report and alert on all the log data in real time from one place. It has limited functionalities and features as compared to the other two versions.

Features of Splunk 

Data Types: Splunk supports any format and any amount of data -enables centralised log management.
Dashboards and Visualisations : Customised dashboards and data visualisations. Dashboards integrate charts, reports and re-usable panels to display a comprehensive data
Monitoring and Alerting : Continuous monitoring of events, conditions, and critical KPIs helps to have greater visibility into your operations.
Reporting : Reports can be created in real time, scheduled to run at any interval.
Apps and Add-ons : Splunk base has 1000+ apps and add-ons from Splunk, partners and community.

Components of Splunk

The primary components in the Splunk architecture are the forwarder, the indexer, and the search head.

Splunk Forwarder:
The forwarder is an agent you deploy on IT systems, which collects logs and sends them to the indexer. Splunk has two types of forwarders:

Universal Forwarder – forwards the raw data without any prior treatment. This is faster, and requires less resources on the host, but results in huge quantities of data sent to the indexer.
Heavy Forwarder – performs parsing and indexing at the source, on the host machine and sends only the parsed events to the indexer.
Splunk Indexer
The indexer transforms data into events, stores it to disk and adds it to an index.

Splunk Search Head
The search head provides the UI users can use to interact with Splunk. It allows users to search and query Splunk data.

What Splunk can Index

Alternative to Splunk

Sumo Logic : allows you to monitor and visualize historical and real-time events.
Loggly : helps you to collect data from the system using Syslog compatibility.
ELK stack : ELK Stack allows users to take to data from any source, in any format, and to search, analyze, and visualize that data.

Hope this gave you a brief about the software and it’s functions. We’ll be adding more related contents soon. Please feel free to add your feedback/questions in the comments section.