Implementing Splunk: Big Data Reporting and Development for Operational Intelligence

Advanced XML structure

Before we dig into the modules provided, let's look at the structure of the XML itself and cover a couple of concepts.

The tag structure of an advanced XML document is essentially:

view
  module
    param
    ...
    module
    ...

The main concept of Splunk's XML structure is that the effects of modules flow downstream to child modules. This is a vital concept to understand. The XML structure has almost nothing to do with layout, and everything to do with the flow of data.

Let's look at a simple example like this:

<view template="dashboard.html"> <label>Chapter 8, Example 1</label> <module name="HiddenSearch" layoutPanel="panel_row1_col1" autoRun="True"> <param name="earliest">-1d</param> <param name="search">error | top user</param> <module ...