Splunk Log Analysis

SIEM applications can ensure easy tracking of issues throughout an environment. Splunk is a wonderful choice, and can make log analysis a quick and painless task.

Splunk uses a Forwarder to collect data from your remote sources, and then aggregates that data in a searchable database. This allows you to use keyword and date range filters to find issues, as well as track down root cause. By searching within the desired source and grouping by hostnames, you can quickly isolate the file and look for the number of occurrences of the error throughout your environment. If you are encountering an issue on multiple machines, this can make troubleshooting much easier.

Once you have an error message identified, you can search Splunk for that error and look for common denominators. If the error occurs on 10000 machines at 4am every day, then there might be a seemingly unrelated process triggering the issue on a schedule. If the error only occurs on machines at one site, it could be a network issue. Finding this data quickly ensures the issue is resolved quickly.

Searching Splunk can be a daunting task at first, but as you learn the syntax, isolating issues is much faster. Sorting results by hostname, limiting timeframe, excluding keywords, and setting thresholds can help resolve your problems and keep machines running as intended.

Many third-party solutions provide integration into Splunk for collection. This will provide you with what the manufacturer considers important to track. You can also raw data collection from system logs to customize the collection of data.