Splunk is a software mainly used for searching, monitoring, and examining machine-generated Big Data through a web-style interface. Splunk performs capturing, indexing, and correlating the real-time data in a searchable container from which it can produce graphs, reports, alerts, dashboards, and visualizations.
This begs the question “What is Splunk and what are its features?”
Splunk allows you to accept any data type like .csv, json, log formats, etc. Offers most powerful search analysis, and visualization capabilities to empower users of all types. Allows you to create a central repository for searching Splunk data from various sources. Important features of Splunk are: Splunk is available in three different versions.
What is a Splunk GUI?
A GUI which allows users to investigate the collected data using some SPLUNK queries, it is a component that revokes back required data in the massive collected database [index]. Generally, the search head generates the request to all the indexes and merges the results, and sends them back as a result.
There are 3 main components in Splunk: Splunk Forwarder, used for data forwarding. Splunk Indexer, used for Parsing and Indexing the data. Search Head, is a GUI used for searching, analyzing and reporting.
Real time processing is Splunk’s biggest selling point because, we have seen storage devices get better and better over the years, we have seen processors become more efficient with every ageing day, but not data movement. This technique has not improved and this is the bottleneck in most of the processes within organizations.
While writing we ran into the question “How did Splunk help in the healthcare industry?”.
One answer is, they collected the healthcare data from the remotely located patients using Io. T devices (sensors). Splunk would process this data and any abnormal activity would be reported to the doctor and patient via the patient interface. Splunk helped them achieve the following :.
What is distributed searching in Splunk?
In a Splunk instance, a search head can send search requests to a group of indexers, or search peers, which perform the actual searches on their indexes. The search head then merges the results and sends them back to the user. This is a faster technique to search data called distributed searching.
What is a splunk search head?
04-13-2010 08:14 PM Search head is simply a Splunk instance that distributes searches to other indexers, and usually doesn’t have any indexes of its own. It’s set up the same as any other distributed searcher, but because it has no local indexes, all results come from remote nodes.
Splunk Search Head Search head is the component used for interacting with Splunk. It provides a graphical user interface to users for performing various operations. You can search and query the data stored in the Indexer by entering search words and you will get the expected result.
How does data move through the Splunk data pipeline?
Data in Splunk moves through the data pipeline in phases. Input data originates from inputs such as files and network feeds. As it moves through the pipeline, processors transform the data into searchable events that encapsulate knowledge.