Getting Data In

Overview of data preview

Splunk Web's data preview feature offers a powerful way to improve event processing. You can use it to make sure that Splunk indexes your data exactly as you want it to appear.

Data preview lets you see how your indexed data will look, while also allowing you to easily make adjustments to improve the outcome. It runs a subset of your data through the normal indexing process but, unlike normal indexing, it does not commit the resulting events to an index. During data preview, you can adjust and improve the indexing process interactively, so, when Splunk later performs the actual indexing, your event data ends up in Splunk formatted exactly as you want it to be.

Here's an example of the main data preview screen:

During data preview, you can adjust how Splunk processes timestamps and event breaks. Once you're satisfied with the results, you can save your changes as a new source type, which you can then apply to your actual data. See "Data preview and source types" for details.

Data preview operates on single files, but with a bit of planning you can also preview data from network or directory inputs. See "Prepare your data" for details.

Note: Data preview is implemented as a Splunk app. It ships as part of Splunk and is enabled at start-up.