Creating a dashboard in the Splunk Metrics Workspace

Your team runs the online store for buttercupgames.com. This website sells games online and tracks system metrics and logs from its online credit card payment service.

To get the most insight from your metrics, you want to set up a dashboard to monitor this data in real time.

You have the following metrics:

• Number of transactions over time
• Overall revenue over time
• Number of errors for the store and payment service

View each of your metrics as time series in the Metrics Workspace. Then save the charts to a dashboard in Splunk.

1. View number of transactions over time
2. View overall revenue over time
3. View number of errors for the store and payment service
4. Save the workspace to a dashboard

View number of transactions over time

1. In the Data panel, search or browse for the posted_payments dataset. This dataset contains the payment logs from your credit card payment provider.
2. Select the transaction_id field to create a chart.
3. In the Analysis panel, select the Count aggregation. Note that because the transaction_id dataset field is a string, the only available aggregations are Count and Distinct count.

View overall revenue over time

1. In the Data panel, select the amount field from the posted_payments dataset. This creates a chart of your revenue.
2. In the Analysis panel, change the aggregation to Sum. The chart updates to show your aggregated total revenue over time.

View number of errors for the store and payment service

1. In the Data panel, search for err. The data hierarchy filters to include only data sources with names that contain err.
2. Select the err_count metric to create a chart.
3. In the Analysis panel, under Split By, select the page dimension. This splits the chart to show errors by page.
4. Under Filters, click + Add New Filter. Select the page dimension. Then select the home, purchase, and review pages. The chart shows errors from these three pages.

Save the workspace to a dashboard

1. From the global actions bar, click the icon and select Save all charts to a dashboard.
2. Enter the dashboard details. Leave the Add interactive time control option selected, so that you can adjust the time range later.
3. Click Save.

Summary

You now have a dashboard that monitors number of transactions over time, overall revenue over time, and number of store and payment service errors. To view your dashboard, click the Dashboard tab on the Search & Reporting bar. Then select the dashboard from the list.

For more information about dashboards in the Splunk platform, see the Dashboard overview in the Dashboards and Visualizations Manual.

For more information about dashboards in the Metrics Workspace, see Dashboards in the Splunk Metrics Workspace.