Splunk Interview Questions and Answers
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Best Splunk Interview Questions and Answers
Whether you are a fresher or an experienced professional looking for the Splunk Interview Questions and Answers, then you are at the right place. To make your job search journey easier, we have gathered a cluster of frequently asked Interview Questions based on the opinions of Splunk Industry experts. In this blog of Splunk interview questions and answers, we have covered frequently asked questions based on Splunk Software. Here I am trying to put all my possible efforts to provide you basic and advanced Splunk interview questions and answers.
On this page, we cover recently asked Splunk interview questions and answers which include various concepts like Splunk Architecture, Indexers, Forwarders, Basic Searches, different commands, and many more. If you want to become a master in Splunk or excited to get placed in the top MNCs then you have landed at the right place. Now have a look at these questions to gain expertise in various concepts related to Splunk.
Top Splunk Interview Questions and Answers
Splunk is named as the Data-to-Everything Platform. It is the software used to help many organizations and businesses to search, visualize, analyze, and monitor the machine-generated Big Data by using a web-style interface. Many firms and innovators implementing Splunk can get a complete view of their business in real-time. Splunk technology is trusted by many customers like Coca-Cola, Zillow, Intel, Acquia, Carnival, and a lot more. Splunk software can also be used to analyze logs and semi-structured data generated by various processes using proper data modeling methodologies as per the companies requirement. Furthermore, Splunk has built-in functionalities for defining search process optimization, field separators, and defining data types. Using Splunk technology, you can quickly get a visualization of data for searched results.
The different versions of Splunk are as follows:
- Splunk Enterprise
- Splunk Light
- Splunk Analytics for Hadoop
The latest version of Splunk available for use is version 8.0 released on October 22, 2019. The subversion of Splunk 8.0 is version 8.0.5, released on July 9, 2020. It has been introduced with the new require command that mainly forces a search to fail if no results are returned.
The new enhancements available in Splunk version 8.0 are:
- Workload Management
- Search and Metrics Performance Improvements
- Python 3.7 support
- Operability and Monitoring
- Security and Telemetry Enhancements
- Alerting
- Analytics Workspace
Splunk Interface is a default window mainly used to interact with the users. Splunk Web Interface different tools that are required by the users to process and analyze data. It also can provide links for in-built apps and data ingestion available in Splunk.
The essential components of Splunk are listed below:
- Splunk Indexers
- Search Head
- Splunk Forwarder
- Deployment Server
The key features of Splunk software are as follows.
- Building and Designing Real-time applications
- Faster ROI Generation
- Visualization and Analysis Capabilities to empower users.
- Agile Figures
- Data Indexing
Forwarders are known as Splunk instances used to forward data to the remote indexers for storage and data processing. Using Forwarders, you can build different environments to handle functions like data routing, load balancing, and data consolidation. The forwarder can transmit three different types of data, such as parsed, unparsed, and raw data.
Types of Forwarders:
- Universal Forwarder
- Heavy Forwarder
- Light Forwarder
Splunk Indexers are used for providing storage and data processing for remote and local data. It is also used to host the primary Splunk data store.
It is the architecture of indexing in Splunk. It provides a functional view of the Splunk indexing.
Deployment Server as a tool plays a crucial role in distributing content updates, apps, and configurations to the Splunk Enterprise Instance Groups. The Splunk Enterprise Instance just acts as a Deployment Server. You can make use of Deployment Server to distribute update notifications to Splunk Components like Indexers, Forwarders, and Search Heads. Moreover, using Deployment Server, you can manage and configure updates. It also enables you to group essential Components of Splunk Enterprise and then distribute content based on the groups.
These are the most commonly used license types that are designed to target the level of access to Splunk Enterprise’s essential features. The following are the various Splunk Platform Licenses.
- Splunk Enterprise License
- Splunk Enterprise Infrastructure License
- Splunk Enterprise Trial License
- Sales Trial License
- Test/Dev License
- Free License
- Splunk Premium App License
- Beta License
- Forwarder License
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The key benefits offered by Splunk are as follows:
- Splunk provides powerful visualization and search tools
- Real-time Screen Visibility
- Reduce time-solving and troubleshooting by providing instant results.
- Gathers Operational Intelligence from your system data.
- Recognition of the different types of data like a log, JSON, .csv formats, and many more.
- Splunk offers a powerful interface
If the license master is down for any specific reason, then immediately the license slave will start a 72 hours timer, and if suppose the license slave does not find ways to communicate with the license master within 72 hours timer, the search will be blocked on the license slave. Furthermore, the users will not be able to search for data until the license slave finds the way to reach the license master again.
Lookups in the Splunk Software are mainly used to match the values of fields present in your event data with the field values in the external lookup tables. You can enrich your event data by adding field values from lookup tables using lookups.
Various Types of Lookups
- CSV lookups
- KV Store lookups
- Geospatial lookups
- External lookups
An Alert in Splunk Software is a type of saved search that triggers when the return results meet the user-defined conditions. There are two different types of alerts available in Splunk, and they are real-time and scheduled alerts. A Splunk Alert has the power to initialize one or more alert actions.
Splunk Pivot tool is used to report a specific dataset without the use of Splunk Search Processing Language. A Pivot works by using data models to define different categories of event data that you work on. Pivot can be created in two different ways, like Data Model Listing page and Dataset Page.
Splunk Data set is defined as a collection of data that is used and maintained accurately for business purposes. The data set is represented in the form of a table consists of field values for cells and fields for columns. In the Data set listing page, you can view and manage data sets.
There are three different types of Data sets, and they are:
- Data Model Data sets
- Lookups
- Table Data sets
A Data Model in Splunk is mainly used to create the hierarchical structure for your data and also establishes the mapping between one or more datasets. Using the data model, you can build different specialized searches for datasets. Furthermore, Splunk software uses these searches to generate reports for pivot users.
You can extract fields using Splunk Enterprise from event data, and those resulted fields are known as extracted fields. Splunk Enterprise can extract a set of default fields for each event it indexes. Every time the field extraction takes place either before event indexing or after event indexing.
Lookup Syntax:
lookup
[local=<bool>]
[update=<bool>]
<lookup-table-name>
( <lookup-field> [AS <event-field>] )…
[ OUTPUT | OUTPUTNEW (<lookup-destfield> [AS <event-destfield>] )… ]
Lookup Example:
Lookup users and return the corresponding group the user belongs to
Suppose you have a lookup table in a stanza named usertogroup in the specified transforms.conf file. The present lookup table contains two specific fields such as user and group. local_user is the field included in your events and for each event the search checks the value in the local_user field to match the corresponding value in the user field in the lookup table.
Output:
… | lookup usertogroup user as local_user OUTPUT group as user_group |
This Application is created and designed to address several use cases on the Splunk Platform. The Splunk App comprises of many knowledge objects like Lookups, forwarders, reports, and a lot more. Sometimes Splunk Apps depends on Add-ons to provide specific functionalities to the users. Some of the examples of Splunk apps are Splunk App for AWS, Search app, etc.
The eval command in Splunk is used to create new fields in your events using an arbitrary expression and existing fields.
Syntax:
eval <field>=<expression>[“,” <field>=<expression>]…
The Splunk stats command is used to calculate statistics based upon the fields present in your events.
Syntax:
stats (stats-function(field) [AS field])… [BY field-list]
It is a pattern that minimizes the risk of bringing up new version software into the existing production environment. It can be achieved by introducing canary release to the subset of users before introducing it to the complete users available in a controlled manner.
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Splunk DB Connect is considered as the best solution for Splunk for working with the database. Using this DB Connect users can easily integrate structured data sources with real-time machine data. Splunk DB Connect supports different platforms like AWS Redshift, Oracle, Teradata, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and many more.
The Splunk top command helps in returning the count and percentage value for each referer domain and the frequency of the values that occur in the events. This command is also used to find the most common values related to the fields in the field list. Top command in Splunk is known as transforming command. The default fields in Top command are percent and count.
Syntax:
top [<N>] [<top-options>…] <field-list> [<by-clause>]
The below image provides you the definitive and well-defined view of the Splunk Architecture.
Splunk software used to help many organizations and businesses to search, visualize, analyze, and monitor the machine-generated Big Data by using a web-style interface. Splunk technology will help you get a visualization of data for searched results. The forwarder is used to forward data to the remote indexers for storage and data processing. Indexers are used for providing storage and data processing for remote and local data. The search Head is used to distribute searches to the indexers.
The comparison between Splunk and AppDynamics is shown below.
Splunk | AppDynamics |
Splunk software helps businesses to search, visualize, analyze, and monitor the machine-generated Big Data by using a web-style interface. | AppDynamics is the best monitoring solution to transform your app performance using Application Performance Management. |
Using Splunk you can uncover bottlenecks in the network | You can find solutions easily and quickly for various business transactions |
The essential feature of Splunk is a log monitoring | A key feature of AppDynamics is detailed statistics |
Splunk provides good ways to troubleshoot problems easily | You can easily detect problems before the problems become more critical |
Splunk is really very expensive | Purchasing Experience through AWS Marketplace was easy and pretty |
The comparison between Splunk and ELK is as follows:
Splunk | ELK |
Splunk platform is designed to help businesses analyze and monitor machine-generated data by using a web-based interface. | It is the most prominently used open-source framework for log analytics. It provides a centralized logging system to identify problems in applications and servers. |
Splunk stores data in Indexes ( flat files contains searchable log events) | ELK also stores data in indexes |
The key components of Splunk are Splunk Indexers, Forwarders, and Search Heads. | The essential components of ELK are Log Data Source, Kibana, File Beat, and Elastic Search. |
Search language is Splunk Processing Language | Search Language is Query DSL |
The comparison between Splunk and Elasticsearch is as follows:
Splunk | Elasticsearch |
Spunk software is known as a data-to-everything platform. It is used to monitor and analyze machine-generated data. | Elasticsearch is the best analytics and search engine for all types of data. |
Splunk software is too expensive | Elasticsearch is free and open-source |
Splunk is traditionally opted to provide an on-premises solution | Tends to provide end to end sources and other premium services |
Splunk contains additional features and pre-loaded wizards | Elasticsearch does not contain any additional features and pre-loaded wizards. |
The CLI Command $ Splunk restart is used for restarting the Splunk Enterprise Server.
There are six types of search commands, and they are:
- Dataset processing command
- Distributable streaming command
- Orchestrating command
- Centralized streaming command
- Generating command
- Transforming command
Splunk Applications are mainly used to package all the knowledge objects like lookups, searches, inputs, etc. Whereas Add-ons help users to address their specific needs quickly and easily. Add-ons also provide specific capabilities for the other apps in monitoring data, getting data, etc.
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