Manage knowledge objects through Settings pages

As your organization uses Splunk software, people add knowledge to the base set of event data indexed within it. You and your colleagues might:

• Save and schedule searches.
• Add tags to fields.
• Define event types and transactions that group together sets of events.
• Create lookups and workflow actions.

The process of creating knowledge objects starts slowly, but it can become complicated as people use Splunk software for longer periods. It is easy to reach a point where users are creating searches that already exist, adding unnecessary tags, designing redundant event types, and so on. These issues may not be significant if your user base is small. But if they accumulate over time, they can cause unnecessary confusion and repetition of effort.

This chapter discusses how knowledge managers can use the Knowledge pages in Settings to control the knowledge objects in their Splunk deployment. Settings can give an attentive knowledge manager insight into what knowledge objects people are creating, who is creating them, and (to some degree) how people are using them.

With Settings, you can easily:

• Create knowledge objects when you need to, either "from scratch" or through object cloning.
• Review knowledge objects as others create them, in order to reduce redundancy and ensure that people are following naming standards.
• Delete unwanted or poorly-defined knowledge objects before they develop downstream dependencies.
• Ensure that knowledge objects worth sharing beyond a particular working group, role, or app are made available to other groups, roles, and users of other apps.

Note: This chapter assumes that you have an admin role or a role with an equivalent permission set.

This chapter contains topics that will explain how to:

• Keep your knowledge object collections normalized and orderly.
• Develop naming conventions for your knowledge objects that will make them easier to understand and use.
• Use the Common Information Model Add-on to normalize your event data.
• Manage your knowledge object permissions. Make a knowledge object available to users of a specific app, users with a specific role, or users of all apps ("global" permissions).
• Disable or delete knowledge objects. Understand the restrictions on deleting knowledge objects, and know the risks of deleting knowledge objects that have downstream dependencies.

Managing knowledge using configuration files instead of Settings

In previous releases, Splunk Enterprise users edited configuration files directly to add, update, or delete knowledge objects. Now they can use the Knowledge pages in Settings, which provide a graphical interface for updating those configuration files.

Note: Splunk Cloud users must use the Splunk Web Knowledge pages in Settings to maintain knowledge objects.

Splunk recommends that Splunk Enterprise administrators learn how to modify configuration files. Understanding configuration files is beneficial for the following reasons:

• Some Splunk Web features make more sense if you understand how things work at the configuration file level. This is especially true for the Field extractions and Field transformations pages in Splunk Web.
• Managing certain knowledge object types requires changes to configuration files.
• Bulk deletion of obsolete, redundant, or improperly-defined knowledge objects is only possible with configuration files.
• You might find that you prefer to work directly with configuration files. For example, if you are a long-time Splunk Enterprise administrator who is already familiar with the configuration file system, you might already be familiar with managing Splunk knowledge using configuration files. Other users rely on the level of granularity and control that configuration files can provide.

The Knowledge Manager manual includes instructions for handling various knowledge object types via configuration files. For more information, see the documentation of those types.

For general information about configuration files in Splunk Enterprise, see the following topics in the Admin manual:

• About configuration files
• Configuration file precedence

The Admin Manual also contains a configuration file reference, which includes .spec and .example files for all the configuration files in Splunk Enterprise.