Splunk® Enterprise

Release Notes

Splunk Enterprise version 7.2 is no longer supported as of April 30, 2021. See the Splunk Software Support Policy for details. For information about upgrading to a supported version, see How to upgrade Splunk Enterprise.
This documentation does not apply to the most recent version of Splunk® Enterprise. For documentation on the most recent version, go to the latest release.

Welcome to Splunk Enterprise 7.2

If you are new to Splunk Enterprise, read the Splunk Enterprise Overview. If you are familiar with Splunk Enterprise and want to explore the new features interactively, download the Splunk Essentials for Cloud and Enterprise app from Splunkbase.

For system requirements information, see the Installation Manual.

Before proceeding, review Known Issues for this release and Fixed issues.

Splunk Enterprise 7.2 was first released on October 2, 2018.

Planning to upgrade from an earlier version?

If you plan to upgrade to this version from an earlier version of Splunk Enterprise, read How to upgrade Splunk Enterprise in the Installation Manual for information you need to know before you upgrade.

See About upgrading: READ THIS FIRST for specific migration tips and information that might affect you when you upgrade.

The Deprecated features topic lists computing platforms, browsers, and features for which Splunk has deprecated or removed support in this release.

What's New in 7.2

New Feature or Enhancement Description
Workload management: search prioritization Workload management enables prioritized provisioning of resource (CPU, memory) allocation for searches, in alignment with business priorities. It allows classification of searches into different resource groups, and then reserves a guaranteed amount of system resources (CPU, memory) per resource group regardless of the load on the system. See About workload management in the Workload Management manual.
SmartStore SmartStore is designed to allow customers to scale compute and storage independently, reducing hardware infrastructure costs and operational complexity. See About SmartStore in Managing Indexers and Clusters of Indexers.
Real-time health monitoring of Splunk deployments Building on the new monitoring framework which will enable a Splunk software feature to publish its state to a collection object accessible via a REST API. A feature using this framework can provide a reason, context, and tips to resolve its unhealthy state. See About proactive Splunk component monitoring in Monitoring Splunk Enterprise.
Guided data onboarding Using both Splunk Web and Splunk documentation, Guided Data Onboarding (GDO) provides end-to-end guidance for getting specific data sources into specific Splunk platform deployments. If you have a Splunk deployment up and running and if you have an admin or equivalent role so that you can install add-ons, you can use these guides to get data from popular data sources into your Splunk deployment. You can find all the Guided Data Onboarding manuals by clicking the Add data tab on the Splunk Enterprise documentation site.
Ingest logs as metrics Ability to convert log data to metric data points at time of ingest. See Overview of log-to-metrics conversion in Metrics.
Ingest-time eval-style extractions You can apply the eval command at data-ingest time, before data is indexed. All eval functions are now available for use when ingesting data into .
Docker support With official support for Splunk Enterprise inside Docker containers, customers can reap the benefits of their investments in container technologies by deploying Splunk software on containerized infrastructures. See Deploy and run Splunk Enterprise inside Docker containers in the Installation Manual.
Dashboard dark theme Optimized dashboard display for NOC/SOC/overhead consumption experience. See Edit Dashboards and Simple XML reference in Dashboards and Visualizations.
Customizable admin user name During installation, a user can specify a username for the default admin role. If a script is used and no username is provided, the user name "admin" is used.
Password expiration reminder Users are prompted to change their password as the expiration date for the password approaches.
RSA multi-factor authentication Multifactor authentication allows you to configure a primary and secondary login for your Splunk Enterprise users. You can configure multifactor authentication using RSA Authentication Manager for Splunk Web, REST endpoints, and CLI.

See About multifactor authentication with RSA Authentication Manager in the Securing Splunk Enterprise manual.

What's New in 7.2.1

Splunk Enterprise 7.2.1 was released on November 9, 2018. It resolves the issues described in Fixed issues.

What's New in 7.2.2

Splunk Enterprise 7.2.2 was released on December 19, 2018. It introduces the following enhancements and resolves the issues described in Fixed issues.

Enhancement Description
Workload management: search prioritization Improved usability and error handling in workload management. This provides a useful analysis on any misconfigurations that could affect the setup and functioning of workload management in Splunkd deployments. See Configure workload management in Workload Management.
systemd support Added systemd as a supported system and service manager for Linux. This allows systemd to be used for managing Splunk software processes, in addition to the existing init daemon(initd), for supported Linux operating system distributions. See Run Splunk Enterprise as a systemd service in Admin Manual.
Improvements to counter metrics Additional support for counter metrics. For more information see Time functions in the Search Reference and Investigate counter metrics in Metrics.
RC4 secret rotation Admin users can use the command-line interface or REST API to generate a new splunk.secret and re-encrypt existing RC4 secrets using AES-GCM. See the section "Update the splunk.secret key file on instances to use the new cipher" in Configure secure communications between Splunk instances with updated cipher suite and message authentication code in Securing Splunk Enterprise.

What's New in 7.2.3

Splunk Enterprise 7.2.3 was released on December 22, 2018. It resolves the issues described in Fixed issues.


What's New in 7.2.4

Splunk Enterprise 7.2.4 was released on February 7, 2019. It introduces the following enhancements and resolves the issues described in Fixed issues.

Enhancement Description
SmartStore monitoring console dashboards New monitoring console dashboards provide insight into the state of the SmartStore capability.

See Troubleshoot with the monitoring console in Managing Indexers and Clusters of Indexers.

What's New in 7.2.5

Splunk Enterprise 7.2.5 was released on March 18, 2019. It resolves the issues described in Fixed issues.

What's New in 7.2.6

Splunk Enterprise 7.2.6 was released on April 16, 2019. It resolves the issues described in Fixed issues.

What's New in 7.2.7

Splunk Enterprise 7.2.7 was released on June 19, 2019. It resolves the issues described in Fixed issues.

What's New in 7.2.8

Splunk Enterprise 7.2.8 was released on September 9, 2019. It introduces the following enhancements and resolves the issues described in Fixed issues.

Enhancement Description
Histogram metric datatype support Splunk Enterprise now supports the histogram metric datatype, which enables you to bucket your metric data into a time series of histograms. You can use the new histperc macro to estimate percentile (a.k.a. quantile) values for specific time periods based on your histogram time series. See Use histogram metrics in the Metrics Manual.
Python future and 2to3 packages Splunk Enterprise 7.2.8 includes the Python libraries "future" and "2to3", which help to make Python 2 syntax compatible with both Python 2 and Python 3. The Splunk Python SDK is dual-compatible via the "Six" library as of v1.6.5, so "future" and "2to3" are most useful for customers who do not use the SDK or who need further modification. See Python 3 Migration for more information.

Documentation Updates

The Workload Management manual is added to the documentation set for Splunk Enterprise 7.2.0 and later. Read this manual to learn how to create policy-based CPU and memory resource groups that you can allocate to search and indexing processes in Splunk Enterprise.

Splunk Enterprise 7.2.0 also introduces new guided data onboarding manuals, which provide end-to-end guidance for getting select data sources into specific Splunk platform deployments. You can find all the guided data onboarding manuals by clicking the Add data tab on the Splunk Enterprise documentation page.

REST API updates

This release includes these new and updated REST API endpoints.

New endpoints:

Updated endpoints:

The REST API Reference Manual describes the endpoints.

Last modified on 20 April, 2020
  Known issues

This documentation applies to the following versions of Splunk® Enterprise: 7.2.8

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