Learning Splunk Web Framework

Vincent Sesto

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781786462947
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Informatica
• Subtopic: Elaborazione di dati

Take your analytics online with the ease and power of the Splunk Web Framework

About This Book

• Want to build rich applications on the Web using Splunk? This book will be your ultimate guide!
• Learn to use web framework components with the help of this highly practical, example-rich guide
• Perform excellent Splunk analytics on the Web and bring that knowledge to your own projects

Who This Book Is For

This book will cater to Splunk developers and administrators who now wish to further their knowledge with Splunk Web Framework and learn to improve the way they present and visualize data in Splunk. A basic knowledge of JavaScript will be beneficial but is not a prerequisite.

What You Will Learn

• Master the fundamentals of Splunk Web Framework
• Start thinking of Splunk as a complete development platform to build user-friendly apps
• Extend the functionality of your apps using SimpleXML techniques
• Set up dashboard layouts, navigation, and menus in your apps
• Create simple dashboard elements including charts and tables
• Master the art of interacting with searches and dashboards
• Integrate SplunkJS to add visual appeal to your website

In Detail

Building rich applications on the Web using Splunk is now simpler than ever before with the Splunk Web Framework. It empowers developers to build their own web applications with custom dashboards, tables, charts, form searches, and other functionalities in the datasets at their disposal.

The book will start with the fundamentals of the Splunk Web Framework, teaching you the secrets of building interesting and user-friendly applications. In the first application, you will learn to analyze and monitor traffic hitting the NASA website and learn to create dashboards for it. You will then learn additional, and more detailed, techniques to enhance the functionalities of the app such as dashboards and forms, editing simple XML, using simple XML extensions, tokens, post-process searches, dynamic drill-downs, the Splunk Web Framework and REST API, and much more. The second app will use historical stock market data and will create custom dashboards using Splunk Web Framework; the book will now cover important topics such as creating HTML dashboards, enhancing the visual appeal of the app using CSS, and moving your app with SplunkJS.

The book will provide different and interesting examples instead of the usual "Log, Index, Search, and Graph" so that Splunk will be the first tool readers think of to resolve a problem.

Style and approach

This book will follow a step-by-step approach whereby every new concept is built on top of the previous chapter, and will be highly practical in nature; the reader will learn to build apps while reading about the Splunk Web framework.

Learning Splunk Web Framework

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Learning Splunk Web Framework

Copyright © 2016 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

First published: August 2016

Production reference: 1260816

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

Livery Place

35 Livery Street

Birmingham

B3 2PB, UK.

ISBN 978-1-78646-294-7

www.packtpub.com

Credits

Author Vincent Sesto	Copy Editor Vikrant Phadke
Reviewer Robert King	Project Coordinator Nidhi Joshi
Commissioning Editor Julian Ursell	Proofreader Safis Editing
Acquisition Editor Manish Nainani	Indexer Mariammal Chettiyar
Content Development Editor Mayur Pawanikar	Graphics Disha Haria
Technical Editor Mohita Vyas	Production Coordinator Arvindkumar Gupta

About the Author

Vincent Sesto, when changing skill sets and moving from business into the information technology field 10 years ago, saw the potential of doing things via technology and has continued to follow his passion to find better ways of doing so. Vince has worked with Splunk for the past 4 years, developing apps and reporting applications around Splunk, and now works hard to advocate its success. He has worked as a system engineer in big data companies and development departments, where he has regularly supported, built, and developed with Splunk. His LinkedIn profile is at https://au.linkedin.com/in/vincesesto.

About the Reviewer

Robert King has primarily served as an engineer, writing desktop, client-server, and web software in more languages than he can remember, and has been building human-computer interfaces for longer than he cares to admit. Although he has also served as sysadmin and DBA, for the last decade he has focused primarily on web-based frontend development, having built experiences used by millions of customers everyday.

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Preface

For some time now, Splunk has been a leading light in providing software that allows its users to search, monitor, and visualize data. The massive expansion in machine data seems endless but we are fortunate to have the tools to deliver and analyze this data and allow us to strip out the irrelevant information, presenting to our user base the important data that will help guide business and technology decisions. Two major strengths that Splunk provides are the ability to quickly analyze your data as well as the ability to present this information to your user in an attractive and customizable way. This presentation layer sitting within Splunk as part of the Splunk Web Framework is a powerful development platform from which we can almost endlessly customize the data we are providing. This book focuses directly on the Splunk Web Framework. It is designed to provide hands-on and interesting examples with step-by-step instructions, to help developers think of Splunk as a complete platform instead of software for searching, monitoring, and analyzing machine-generated data. This book provides different and interesting examples instead of the usual “Log, Index, Search, and Graph” and has the reader thinking in terms of Splunk being the first tool they think of when needing to resolve any problem.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Splunk Web Framework Fundamentals, provides a high-level overview of the framework as well as discussing development environments and collaborating with development teams.

Chapter 2, Presenting Data to Users as a Splunk App, will introduce Splunk Apps and get you to use the Web Interface to create basic dashboards to present their data.

Chapter 3, Expand Your Apps Using Simple XML, expands you knowledge of Splunk App development by introducing Simple XML to manipulate the underlying dashboard code.

Chapter 4, Layouts, Navigation, and Menus, provides you with an overview of how to use Simple XML to control the layout of you dashboards as well as setting up a menu system for you Splunk App.

Chapter 5, Interacting with Your User While Speeding Up App Searches, discusses how to add features to your Simple XML code to allow your user to interact directly with their Splunk data.

Chapter 6, Moving from Simple XML to HTML, introduces HTML dashboards and provides an explanation of the HTML code that is generated as part of the Splunk dashboard.

Chapter 7, JavaScript Modules in Your HTML App, provides a discussion on how to work directly with JavaScript modules in your Splunk App to further enhance functionality.

Chapter 8, Utilizing CSS to Spice Up Visual Appeal, discusses working directly with CSS files to manipulate the look and feel of a dashboard and move away from the standard Splunk color scheme.

Chapter 9, Moving Your App off Splunk with SplunkJS, provides an in-depth introduction to using SplunkJS to create standalone web applications with the use of Splunk data.

What you need for this book

To be able to work along with the example applications created in this book, you will need to have the following items available:

• A running version of Splunk Enterprise, preferably on Linux or Mac
• Basic knowledge of Splunk and how it works, including creating searches and reports, indexing data, and knowledge of Web interface
• A modern and stable web browser, such as Chrome or Firefox
• A basic understanding of web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
• Some basic knowledge of Python
• An Internet connection

Who this book is for

This book is designed to start from an overview of the Splunk Web framework and get an inexperienced Splunk user to work fast with hands-on examples. The examples build on top of each other to cover more advanced topics, so it is hoped that even an experienced Splunk developer will be able to get something out of this book as the chapters progress.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "By clicking on the Splunk logo at the top left of the screen, we are brought to the home page, http://localhost:8000/en-GB/app/launcher/home ."

A block of code is set as follows:

1 <dashboard> 2 <label>SimpleXMLDashboard</label>

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

 echo "# SplunkAppDev" >> README.md 

New terms and important words are shown in bold.

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips a...