Getting Data In

Whitelist- or blacklist-specific incoming data

Use whitelist and blacklist rules to explicitly tell Splunk Enterprise which files to consume when monitoring directories. You can also apply these settings to batch inputs. When you define a whitelist Splunk Enterprise indexes only the files in that list. When you define a blacklist, Splunk Enterprise ignores the files in that list and consumes everything else. Define whitelists and blacklists in the input stanza in inputs.conf.

It is not necessary to define both a whitelist and a blacklist in a stanza. They are independent settings. If you do define both and a file matches both, Splunk Enterprise does not index that file as blacklist overrides whitelist.

Whitelist and blacklist rules use regular expression syntax to define the match on the file name/path. They must be contained within a configuration stanza, for example [monitor://<path>]. Splunk Enterprise ignores whitelists and blacklists outside of stanzas.

To learn more about how to build regular expressions, visit the Regular-expressions.info (http://regular-expressions.info) website.

When you define whitelist and blacklist entries, you must use exact regular expression syntax.

Route and filter data

Instead of whitelisting or blacklisting your data inputs, you can filter specific events and send them to different queues or indexes. You can also use the crawl feature to predefine files you want Splunk to index or not index when they get added to your file system.

Whitelist (allow) files

To define the files you want to exclusively index, add the following line to your monitor stanza in the /local/inputs.conf file for the app this input was defined in:

whitelist = <your_custom regex>

For example, to monitor only files with the .log extension:

[monitor:///mnt/logs]
    whitelist = \.log$

You can whitelist multiple files in one line, using the "|" (OR) operator. For example, to whitelist filenames that contain query.log OR my.log:

whitelist = query\.log$|my\.log$

Or, to whitelist exact matches:

whitelist = /query\.log$|/my\.log$

Note: The "$" anchors the regex to the end of the line. There is no space before or after the "|" operator.

Blacklist (ignore) files

To define the files you want Splunk Enterprise to exclude from indexing, add the following line to your monitor stanza in the /local/inputs.conf file for the app this input was defined in:

blacklist = <your_custom regex>

If you create a blacklist line for each file you want to ignore, Splunk activates only the last filter.

To ignore and not monitor only files with the .txt extension:

[monitor:///mnt/logs]
    blacklist = \.(txt)$

To ignore and not monitor all files with either the .txt extension OR the .gz extension (note that you use the "|" for this):

[monitor:///mnt/logs]
    blacklist = \.(txt|gz)$

To ignore entire directories beneath a monitor input refer to this example:

[monitor:///mnt/logs]
    blacklist = (archive|historical|\.bak$)

This example tells Splunk Enterprise to ignore all files under /mnt/logs/ within the archive or historical directories and all files ending in *.bak.

To ignore files whose names contain a specific string, you can do:

[monitor:///mnt/logs]
   blacklist = 2009022[8|9]file\.txt$

This example ignores the webserver20090228file.txt and webserver20090229file.txt files under /mnt/logs/.