Splunk Best Practices

Preface

Within the working world of technology, there are hundreds of thousands of different applications, all (usually) logging in different formats. As a Splunk expert, our job is make all those logs speak human, which is often the impossible task. With third-party applications that provide support, sometimes log formatting is out of our control. Take, for instance, Cisco or Juniper, or any other leading leading manufacturer.

These devices submit structured data,specific to the manufacturer.  There are also applications that we have more influence on, which are usually custom applications built for a specific purpose by the development staff of your organization. These are usually referred to as 'Proprietary applications' or 'in-house' or 'home ...