Search performance is key to an efficient Splunk environment – no one wants to be waiting around forever waiting for search results to load. If your Splunk searches are taking a long time to run, here are simple things you can do to improve them.
1. Be specfic
The most important thing to be specific about is the index and time-range of your search – avoid searching index=* or doing all-time searches.
Splunk will return any event that includes any of the terms that appear before the first pipeline in your search. This is a time-consuming part of the process, and you should aim to return only the events you need. More search terms before the first pipe means that Splunk needs to return fewer events to you, speeding the process up. If you know that the keyword you are searching for appears in a certain field, search for field=keyword in order to make the search more efficient.
2. Wildcard with care
You can use wildcards (*) in your searches, but make sure that they only replace the end of a string. A wildcard in the middle of a string will return inconsistent and inaccurate results, especially if it contains punctuation. If you start a search term with *, it will search for everything, which is obviously going to be time-consuming.
3. Use TERM()s
This is one of the most powerful ways you can improve search times in Splunk, but not many people know about it. Understanding why TERM() is so important requires a bit of an explanation of how Splunk works, so bear with me for a few minutes.
Splunk stores your data in buckets based on their index and timestamp and keeps track of the contents using a tsidx file, a time-series index that lists each unique term in your data and tells Splunk where to find it amongst the raw data.
When you search, Splunk takes everything in your search up to the first pipe and splits it into unique terms using major and minor breakers. For example:
- “ERROR HttpListener – Exception while processing request” becomes ERROR Exception HttpListener processing request while
- 192.168.1.1 becomes 1 168 192 and 192.168.1.1
- becomes com idelta name and
Major and Minor breakers
Major breakers in Splunk include:a space, a new line, a carriage return, a tab, and the following symbols: [ ] < > ( ) { } | ! ; , ‘ ” *Minor breakers include:
/ : = @ . – $ # % \\ _
Get Updates on the Splunk Community!
Splunk Observability has two new enhancements to make it quicker and easier to troubleshoot slow or frequently ...
This blog post is part of an ongoing series on OpenTelemetry. In this blog post, we will explore the best way ...
WATCH NOWSplunk Assist is a fully-managed cloud service that provides regularly updated security and ...