Hi everyone! In this blog, we will see the introduction to Splunk. But before explaining what is Splunk let us first know “why Splunk”? We use Splunk to accelerate digitalization, to ensure business resilience, and to meet the data opportunity of today and tomorrow. It is the only platform that allows you to investigate, monitor, analyze and act with any structure, any source, any time scale, any action.
Introduction:
Splunk is software that processes and brings out insight from machine data and other forms of big data. It is a one-stop solution as it automatically pulls data from various sources. It accepts data in any format such as .csv, JSON, configuration files, etc. In other words, we can say that it is the easiest tool to install. It allows functionalities like searching, analyzing, reporting as well as visualizing machine data.
Splunk Architecture:
This is the work architecture of Splunk. In the above figure, a couple of components are connected. In a distributed search, set up the search head knows about all indexers in the environment when a search is submitted by the users. The search head submits that search to each indexer individually and they run in parallel. Each indexer contains a portion of the entire data set and so returns the result for that portion of the data. The search head then aggregates or puts all the results back together giving the user the final result.
How communication take place:
This diagram shows how everything is connected and how communication happens. Starting with the knowledge base, it uses events, timestamps, tags, fields to get different insights. Knowledge manager manages this data to solve real-world problems. Then control access creates different users and assigns the role. The role determines the access and permission of any user assigned to that role.
After that run script, in Splunk enterprise, you can run an alert script. When an alert triggers for building a custom application. The network port monitors the TCP or UDP ports to add data from the Syslog service on one or more machines basically for input, monitor file specify a path to a file or directory and the monitor processor consumes any new data written to that file or directory.
This is how you can monitor live application logs such as those coming from Webex logs, java platform enterprise editor or .net app, and so on. Splunk Enterprise monitors and indexes the file or directory as new data appears with distributed searches we can get the search head to 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 back to the user.
This architecture work in such a way that Splunk CLI or Splunk web interface or any other interface interact with the search head. This communication happens via REST API. You can then use the search here to make distributed searches set up knowledge objects for operational intelligence perform scheduling or alerting and create reports or dashboards for visualization. You can also run scripts for automating data forwarding from remote Splunk forwarder to predefined network ports.
After that, you can monitor the files that are coming in real-time and analyze if there are any anomalies and set alerts or reminders accordingly and you can also perform routine cloning and load balancing of the data that is coming from the forwarded before they are stored in an indexer. You can also create multiple users to perform the various operation in the index data.
Advantages of Splunk:
- Collects data in real-time for multiple systems.
- Accepts data in any form like log file, .csv, JSON, config etc.
- Pull data from database, cloud, and any other OS.
- Analyze and visualize the data for better performance.
- Provides real-time visibility.
- Satisfies industry needs like horizontal scalability.
Splunk Products:
- Splunk Enterprise: It is use by companies that have large IT infrastructure and IT-driven business. It helps in gathering and analyzing data from websites, applications, devices, sensors, etc.
- Splunk Cloud: It is the cloud host platform with the same features as the enterprise version. It can be avail 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. It is the lighter version of Splunk.
Conclusion:
Splunk is a software platform to search, analyze and visualize machine-generated data. Machine data gathered from the website, applications sensors devices, etc which make up your IT infrastructure and business.
