Splunk® Enterprise

Developing Views and Apps for Splunk Web

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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.
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Set up external validation

In your modular input script, it is a good idea to validate the configuration of your input. Specify <use_external_validation>true</use_external_validation> in your introspection scheme to enable external validation.

If you provide an external validation routine and enable external validation the following occurs when a user creates or edits the configuration for a script:

1. Splunk software reads the configuration parameters from the user and creates an XML configuration of the parameters.

The XML configuration looks something like this:

<items>
    <server_host>myHost</server_host>
    <server_uri>https://127.0.0.1:8089</server_uri>
    <session_key>123102983109283019283</session_key>
    <checkpoint_dir>/opt/splunk/var/lib/splunk/modinputs</checkpoint_dir>
    <item name="myScheme">
        <param name="param1">value1</param>
        <param_list name="param2">
            <value>value2</value>
            <value>value3</value>
            <value>value4</value>
        </param_list>
    </item>
</items>

Notes: The <items> element can only contain one <item>. (This is because you can only operate on one item at a time.) The XML stream itself must be encoded in UTF-8.

Refer to the Read XML configuration from splunkd section for a description of the XML configuration.


2. Splunk software invokes your script with the --validate-arguments option, passing in the XML configuration.


3. Your script validation routine determines if the configuration is valid.

  • If the configuration is valid, your script exits with return status of zero.
  • Otherwise the script exits with a non-zero status and a message indicating why configuration failed. Format the message in <error> tags so Splunk software can properly display the message in Splunk Web.
<error>
    <message>Access is denied.</message>
</error>


The following snippets shows how the S3 example validates data returned from the Amazon S3 service. The snippet at the end shows how to provide the --validate-arguments option when invoking the script. This script has been made cross-compatible with Python 2 and Python 3 using python-future.

Validation snippets

. . .
from builtins import str
def get_validation_data():
    val_data = {}

    # read everything from stdin
    val_str = sys.stdin.read()

    # parse the validation XML
    doc = xml.dom.minidom.parseString(val_str)
    root = doc.documentElement

    logging.debug("XML: found items")
    item_node = root.getElementsByTagName("item")[0]
    if item_node:
        logging.debug("XML: found item")

        name = item_node.getAttribute("name")
        val_data["stanza"] = name

        params_node = item_node.getElementsByTagName("param")
        for param in params_node:
            name = param.getAttribute("name")
            logging.debug("Found param %s" % name)
            if name and param.firstChild and \
               param.firstChild.nodeType == param.firstChild.TEXT_NODE:
                val_data[name] = param.firstChild.data

    return val_data

# make sure that the amazon credentials are good
def validate_arguments():
    val_data = get_validation_data()

    try:
        url = "s3://" + val_data["stanza"]
        bucket, obj = read_from_s3_uri(url)
        conn = get_http_connection(val_data["key_id"], val_data["secret_key"], bucket, obj, method = "HEAD")
        resp = conn.getresponse()
        log_response(resp)
        if resp.status != 200:
            raise Exception("Amazon returned HTTP status code %d (%s): %s" % (resp.status, resp.reason, get_amazon_error(resp.read())))

    except Exception as e:
        print_error("Invalid configuration specified: %s" % str(e))
        sys.exit(1)
. . .
# Provide --validate-arguments arg on startup
if __name__ == '__main__':
    if len(sys.argv) > 1:
        if sys.argv[1] == "--scheme":
            do_scheme()
        elif sys.argv[1] == "--validate-arguments":
            validate_arguments()
        elif sys.argv[1] == "--test":
            test()
        else:
            usage()
    else:
        # just request data from S3
        run()

Last modified on 13 August, 2019
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This documentation applies to the following versions of Splunk® Enterprise: 7.0.0, 7.0.2, 7.0.3, 7.0.4, 7.0.5, 7.0.6, 7.0.7, 7.0.8, 7.0.9, 7.0.10, 7.0.11, 7.0.13, 7.1.0, 7.1.1, 7.1.2, 7.1.3, 7.1.4, 7.1.5, 7.1.6, 7.1.7, 7.1.8, 7.1.9, 7.1.10, 7.2.0, 7.2.2, 7.2.3, 7.2.4, 7.2.5, 7.2.6, 7.2.7, 7.2.8, 7.2.9, 7.2.10, 7.3.0, 7.3.1, 7.3.2, 7.3.3, 7.3.4, 7.3.5, 7.3.6, 7.3.7, 7.3.8, 7.3.9, 8.0.0, 8.0.1, 8.0.2, 8.0.3, 8.0.5, 8.0.10, 7.2.1, 7.0.1, 8.0.4, 8.0.9, 8.1.0, 8.1.1, 8.1.2, 8.1.3, 8.1.4, 8.1.5, 8.1.6, 8.1.7, 8.1.8, 8.1.9, 8.1.10, 8.1.11, 8.1.12, 8.1.13, 8.1.14, 8.2.0, 8.2.1, 8.2.2, 8.2.3, 8.2.4, 8.2.5, 8.2.6, 8.2.7, 8.2.8, 8.2.9, 8.2.10, 8.2.11, 8.2.12, 9.0.0, 9.0.1, 9.0.2, 9.0.3, 9.0.4, 9.0.5, 9.0.6, 9.0.7, 9.0.8, 9.1.0, 9.1.1, 9.1.2, 9.1.3, 9.2.0, 8.0.6, 8.0.7, 8.0.8


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