Overwrite asset or identity data with entitymerge in Splunk Enterprise Security

After you add assets and identities to Splunk Enterprise Security, you can use the entitymerge command to merge or overwrite asset or identity data based on matched foreign keys. See Add asset and identity data to Splunk Enterprise Security.

The purpose of the command is to merge assets or identities based on key fields. The intention is to take multiple rows of assets or identities with duplicate information in the key fields, pipe them to the entitymerge command, and merge them into a single asset or identity.

Description

Use the entitymerge command to merge or overwrite asset or identity data based on matched key fields. Primarily, you use it by default in the Search Preview tab of Asset and Identity Management. You can use it manually for debugging. See Search Preview.

Syntax

entitymerge <entitymerge-target>

Required arguments

entitymerge-target

Syntax: [asset|identity]

Description: Required target of the entitymerge command.

Example

You can see examples of the entitymerge command in the Search Preview tab of Asset and Identity Management.

One example is the search preview for asset_lookup_by_str, the asset table that uses string matching to enrich events:

| `add_entity_source("demo_asset_lookup","demo_assets")` | `add_entity_source("frothly_assets_2018","frothly_assets_2018")` | `add_entity_source("seckit_idm_assets_aws_ec2","frothly_aws_assets_2018")` | `add_entity_source("simple_asset_lookup","static_assets")` | table "_source","cim_entity_zone","bunit","category","city","country","dns","ip","is_expected","lat","long","mac","nt_host","owner","pci_domain","priority","requires_av","should_timesync","should_update" | `make_ip_str` | inputlookup append=T "asset_lookup_by_str" | entitymerge "asset"

To see an example of the merge behavior when turned on versus turned off, see Example.

For more information about merge behavior after upgrading to Enterprise Security 6.0 and higher, see Manage asset and identity upon upgrade.

For a high-level overview of processing and merging, see How Splunk Enterprise Security processes and merges asset and identity data.