Splunk Search

Is there SPL's worst practice?

to4kawa
Ultra Champion

I've seen a lot of join, transaction and append SPLs.
Using timechart to show percentage of each time, it's hard. but everybody wants to do it.

I think you didn't have to use that SPL.

There is a best practice, but I don't know worst practice

Is there SPL's worst practice? or Can you tell me what's wrong with this way of using it?

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1 Solution

gcusello
SplunkTrust
SplunkTrust

Hi @to4kawa,
i didn't find a worst practice guide and I'm agree that it could be useful, especially for the new entries: e.g. all the people that worked with SQL and approach Splunk, start using join command in searches!
Anyway a worst practices is surely the opposite of a best practice, and I didn't find a structured guide neither to this, only some hints in a course that I followed at the beginning.
And in addition, i don't think that someone in Splunk can say that there's a worst practice: it isn't a good marketing approach!

In my experience, I try to avoid some features for performace reasons or symply to have a more readable code, these are the main worst practices I avoid:

  • I try to avoid transaction and join commands every time I can and this is the main worst prectice!
  • I usually use append (with attention to the number of subsearch results) without problems.
  • I don't like automatic lookups so as not to lose the thread of logic of a search.
  • I don't like to use DB-Connect (I use it only if I'm forced!) for security reasons and I prefer to use an export of data on a file.

Then there's something else, but less important:

  • i don't like to use Field Extractor, I prefer to create fields using regexes.
  • i don't like to have different different eval for each field transformation, I prefer to have one eval.
  • i don't like to leave the token's name in the time picker.
  • etc...

Ciao.
Giuseppe

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lloydknight
Builder

hello @gcusello

I don't like automatic lookups so as not to lose the thread of logic of a search.

About this one worst practice, I understand that this facility has a performance impact but this is always being catered on the intro courses. What alternatives will you recommend should we avoid automatic lookups aside from using | inputlookup ?

Sorry for this question under a comment.

0 Karma

gcusello
SplunkTrust
SplunkTrust

Hi @lloydknight,
I don't use automatic lookups, I prefer to use in searches the lookup command.

my hint is only related to automatic lookups not to lookups.

Ciao.
Giuseppe

0 Karma

martin_mueller
SplunkTrust
SplunkTrust

I'd say using automatic lookups is good practice.

  • avoids duplication of SPL when the lookup is used in multiple searches
  • reduces the knowledge a searcher needs to have, they can just look at the events and see the output fields instead of having to know about the lookup file
  • usually no negative performance impact
0 Karma
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