Monitor Linux Server with Splunk

Continuous monitoring is an important part of software development. It is something we take up as measure to maintain the health of a software & to improve the quality of the software, & this is based on feedback we get from the insights gained from monitoring.

Types of data that we can monitor -

1. Application Metrics

2. Application Logs

3. Transactional data

4. API data

5. Customer data

6. Network data

7. Configuration settings

8. security data

9. Business related data

Types of monitoring -

1. System performance

2. process monitoring

3. integration

4. application performance

5. Business monitoring

Monitoring Tools available w.r.t. Software development -

1. Prometheus

2. Grafana

3. Nagios

4. Amazon cloud watch

5. Splunk

6. ELK stack — Elasticsearch

7. Datadog

Splunk is a software platform for searching, monitoring, and analyzing machine-generated data, including logs, events, and metrics. It is used by organizations of all sizes to improve their IT operations and security. Splunk is paid tool. Free version has very less features.

Splunk is better than other monitoring tools in several ways:

• Ease of use: Splunk is relatively easy to use, even for users with limited technical expertise.

• Scalability: Splunk can scale to handle very large volumes of data, making it ideal for enterprise environments.

• Flexibility: Splunk is very flexible and can be used for a wide range of monitoring tasks, including log management, application monitoring, security monitoring, and compliance reporting.

• Power: Splunk’s powerful search and analytics capabilities make it easy to identify trends and patterns in data that would be difficult to find with other tools.

Benefits of Splunk -

1. Data analytics

2. Easy to use

3. Good customer support

4. ML abilities

5. Real-time performance monitoring

6. Logging tool

7. Stack security and alerting

8. Dashboards & visualizations

Splunk Products -

1. Splunk Core = Splunk enterprise — for monitoring

2. Splunk IT operations

3. Splunk security

4. Splunk DevOps

Splunk enterprise has set of tools -

1. Forwarder

2. Indexer

3. Search head

Each of these tools have their own servers.

Splunk Enterprise Layout -

There are different types of licenses in Splunk that you can purchase to make use of different services within Splunk enterprise. These can be:

• Slunk Platform License,

• Splunk Enterprise infrastructure license

• Splunk Enterprise Trial license

• Free license

Splunk Enterprise license contains -

1. Forwarder License

2. Beta License

3. Splunk premium app license

4. Splunk industrial IoT license

Splunk Enterprise -

Splunk Enterprise is a software product that enables you to search, analyze, and visualize the data gathered from the components of your IT infrastructure or business. Splunk Enterprise takes in data from websites, applications, sensors, devices, and so on. After you define the data source, Splunk Enterprise indexes the data stream and parses it into a series of individual events that you can view and search.

Most users connect to Splunk Enterprise with a web browser and use Splunk Web to administer their deployment, manage and create knowledge objects, run searches, create pivots and reports, and so on. You can also use the command-line interface to administer your Splunk Enterprise deployment.

Features of Splunk Enterprise

The following section highlights seven Splunk Enterprise features.

Indexing

Splunk Enterprise processes and stores the data that represents your business and its infrastructure. You can collect data from devices and applications such as websites, servers, databases, operating systems, and more. Once the data is collected, the index segments, stores, compresses the data, and maintains the supporting metadata to accelerate searching. To learn about getting your data into Splunk Enterprise.

Search

Search is the primary way users navigate their data in Splunk Enterprise. You can save a search as a report and use it to power dashboard panels. Searches provide insight from your data, such as:

• Retrieving events from an index

• Calculating metrics

• Searching for specific conditions within a rolling time window

• Identifying patterns in your data

• Predicting future trends

Alerts

Alerts notify you when search results for both historical and real-time searches meet configured conditions. You can configure alerts to trigger actions like sending alert information to designated email addresses, posting alert information to an RSS feed, and running a custom script, such as one that posts an alert event to syslog.

Dashboards

Dashboards contain panels of modules like search boxes, fields, charts, and so on. Dashboard panels are usually connected to saved searches or pivots. They display the results of completed searches and data from real-time searches that run in the background.

Reports

Splunk Enterprise allows you to save searches and pivots as reports, and then add reports to dashboards as dashboard panels. Run reports on an ad hoc basis, schedule them to run on a regular interval, or set a scheduled report to generate alerts when the result meets particular conditions.

Data model

Data models encode specialized domain knowledge about one or more sets of indexed data. They enable Pivot Editor users to create reports and dashboards without designing the searches that generate them.

By above steps and experimenting with different search queries, you can effectively search and analyze data collected by the “Splunk Add-on for Unix and Linux” to gain insights into your Unix and Linux systems.