Create reports that display summary statistics

This topic discusses using the stats and eventstats transforming commands to create reports that display summary statistics related to a field.

The stats and eventstats commands

The eventstats command works in exactly the same manner as the stats command, except that the aggregation results of the command are added inline to each event, and only the aggregations that are pertinent to each event.

Using split-by clauses

To fully utilize the stats command, you need to include a "split by" clause. For example, the following report won't provide much information:

sourcetype=access_combined | stats avg(kbps)

It gives you the average of kbps for all events with a sourcetype of access_combined--a single value. The resulting column chart contains only one column.

But if you break out the report with a split by field, Splunk software generates a report that breaks down the statistics by that field. The following report generates a column chart that sorts through the access_combined logs to get the average thruput (kbps), broken out by host:

sourcetype=access_combined | stats avg(kbps) by host

Examples

Example 1: Create a report that shows you the CPU utilization of Splunk processes, sorted in descending order:

index=_internal "group=pipeline" | stats sum(cpu_seconds) by processor | sort sum(cpu_seconds) desc

Example 2: Create a report to display the average kbps for all events with a sourcetype of access_combined, broken out by host.

You specify the field name for the eventstats results by adding the as argument. So the first example above could be restated with "avgkbps" being the name of the new field that contains the results of the eventstats avg(kbps) operation:

sourcetype=access_combined | eventstats avg(kbps) as avgkbps by host

When you run this set of commands, Splunk software adds a new avgkbps field to each sourcetype=access_combined event that includes the kbps field. The value of avgkbps is the average kbps for that event.