Welcome to the Splunk Tutorial
Welcome to the Splunk Tutorial
What is Splunk?
Splunk is software that indexes IT data from any application, server or network device that makes up your IT infrastructure. It's a powerful and versatile search and analysis engine that lets you investigate, troubleshoot, monitor, alert, and report on everything that's happening in your entire IT infrastructure from one location in real time.
Want to learn more about all the kinds of data Splunk can index? Read "What is IT data?" on our website.
Who uses Splunk?
Splunk is versatile and thus has many uses and many different types of users. System administrators, network engineers, security analysts, developers, service desk, and support staff -- even Managers, VPs, and CIOs -- use Splunk to do their jobs better and faster.
- Application support staff use Splunk for end-to-end investigation and remediation across the application environment and to create alerts and dashboards that proactively monitor performance, availability, and business metrics across an entire service. They use roles to segregate data access along lines of duties and give application developers and Tier One support access to the information they need from production logs without compromising security.
- System administrators and IT staff use Splunk to investigate server problems, understand their configurations, and monitor user activity. Then, they turn the searches into proactive alerts for performance thresholds, critical system errors, and load.
- Senior network engineers use Splunk to troubleshoot escalated problems, identify events and patterns that are indicators of routine problems, such as misconfigured routers and neighbor changes, and turn searches for these events into proactive alerts.
- Security analysts and incident response teams use Splunk to investigate activity for flagged users and access to sensitive data, automatically monitor for known bad events, and use sophisticated correlation via search to find known risk patterns such as brute force attacks, data leakage, and even application-level fraud.
- Managers in all solution areas use Splunk to build reports and dashboards to monitor and summarize the health, performance, activity, and capacity of their IT infrastructure and businesses.
What's in this tutorial?
If you're new to Splunk, this tutorial will teach you what you need to know to start using Splunk, from a first-time download to creating rich, interactive dashboards.
This documentation applies to the following versions of Splunk: 4.1 , 4.1.1 , 4.1.2 , 4.1.3 , 4.1.4 , 4.1.5 , 4.1.6 , 4.1.7 , 4.1.8 , 4.2 , 4.2.1 , 4.2.2 , 4.2.3 , 4.2.4 , 4.2.5 , 4.3 , 4.3.1 , 4.3.2 View the Article History for its revisions.
This was a very well paced tutorial. Not to wordy and not to brief. Thanks a lot!