How do I check Splunk errors?

The Splunk Product Best Practices team helped produce this response. Read more about use case examples Splunk® Platform Use Cases on Splunk Docs.

This use case enables system administrators to identify when logs generate error messages or exceptions so they can receive timely notifications and take timely action.

This use case is from the Splunk Essentials for Infrastructure Troubleshooting and Monitoring app. For more examples, see the Splunk Essentials for Infrastructure Troubleshooting and Monitoring on Splunkbase.

Load data

How to implement:

  1. Ingest application and operating system logs into Splunk Enterprise. Install the Splunk Add-on for Windows or *nix, and enable file and directory inputs for your entire infrastructure.
  2. Enable the File and Directory Inputs section of the configuration page.
  3. Enable or disable the input for the specified file or directory. Find the Splunk Add-on for Windows and Splunk Add-on for Unix and Linux on Splunkbase.

Data check: This use case depends on application logs and operating system logs.

Get insights

Find errors, failures and exceptions from all over your network using the Splunk Add-on for Windows or *nix. Search for error messages and exceptions so you can investigate and correct them.

Use the following search:

host=* (*error* OR *exception* OR *fail*)
| head 100
| table _time host sourcetype _raw
| sort host asc, _time desc

Best practice: In searches, replace the asterisk in index=* with the name of the index that contains the data. By default, Splunk stores data in the main index. Therefore, index=* becomes index=main. Use the OR operator to specify one or multiple indexes to search. For example, index=main OR index=security. See About managing indexes and How indexing works in Splunk docs for details.

Help

If no results appear, deploy the Add-ons to the search heads to access the knowledge objects necessary for simple searching. See About installing Splunk add-ons on Splunk Docs for assistance.

For more support, post a question to the Splunk Answers community.

Question 1: Is there a centralized place to search for all Splunk error messages? Searching answers.splunk.com I've not been able to find a reference to, or solution for,

"Error in 'rex' command: Invalid argument: '(' The search job has failed due to an error. You may be able view the job in the Job Inspector."

Question 2: Why does this rex query work fine in a search, but then fail when used in both a primary and a subsearch? I need to parse fields in both places. I built an initial query that worked fine alone, then created a subsearch and copied/pasted the rex into it. It now fails with

"Error in 'rex' command: Invalid argument: '(' The search job has failed due to an error. You may be able view the job in the Job Inspector." 

What do you think is going on, and how do I fix it? The purpose is to find Devices with Tasks that failed at one time, but where a later Task succeeded. Thanks so much.

Here is the code, although for some reason the * asterisks after each dot (.) in the regexes don't seem to come through in the preview window:

source="File1.csv" index="inventory-legacy" | regex Notes="^Succ.*" | transaction Description | rex field=Description "^(?<TaskID>[^-]+).*" | rex field=Description "^[^-]+-(?<DeviceName>.*)" [ search source="File1.csv" index="inventory-legacy" | regex Notes="^Fail.*" | transaction Description | rex field=Description "^(?<TaskID>[^-]+).*" | rex field=Description "^[^-]+-(?<DeviceName>.*)" | dedup DeviceName, TaskID | fields DeviceName ] |sort  -_time, +TaskID, +DeviceName | table _time, TaskID, DeviceName, Description, Notes

The Splunk Product Best Practices team helped produce this response. Read more about example use cases in the Splunk Platform Use Cases manual.

For more information on this and other examples, download the free Splunk Essentials for Infrastructure Troubleshooting and Monitoring app on Splunkbase.

Application support engineers can pinpoint when a single server within a group of servers is generating errors, which can be critical to troubleshooting application issues.

Load data

How to implement: This example use case depends on application logs, application error logs, or both.

Ingest application logs from web servers, load balancers, application servers, and so on, and search for specific application errors or error codes. Use some basic searches to identify errors that originate from a specific server. You can display results in a dashboard, or just use the built-in features of the search window. For an elementary walk-through of how to use basic Splunk searches to find specific error codes, see the following video.

How do I check Splunk errors?

Best practice: For all of the data inputs, specify a desired target index to provide a more sustainable practice for data access controls and retention models. By default, Splunk collects the data in the default index named main.

Get insights

Quickly identify which servers are impacted by a specific error.

Run the following search.

index=* ("*error*" OR "*fail*") 
| top host limit=100

Best practice: In searches, replace the asterisk in index=* with the name of the index that contains the data. By default, Splunk stores data in the main index. Therefore, index=* becomes index=main. Use the OR operator to specify one or multiple indexes to search. For example, index=main OR index=security. See About managing indexes and How indexing works in Splunk docs for details.

Help

If no results appear, it may be because the add-ons were not deployed to the search heads, so the needed tags and fields are not defined. Deploy the add-ons to the search heads to access the needed tags and fields. See About installing Splunk add-ons in the Splunk Add-ons manual.

For troubleshooting tips that you can apply to all add-ons, see Troubleshoot add-ons in the Splunk Add-ons manual.

For more support, post a question to the Splunk Answers community.

How do I check Splunk logs?

Search Application Logs. Application logs can be accessed through Splunk. To start a new search, open the Launcher menu from the HERE platform portal and click on Logs (see menu item 3 in Figure 1). The Splunk home page opens and you can begin by entering a search term and starting the search.

How do I check my Splunk server status?

Using | metasearch you have a very quick search, so you don't need to use only one event. You can run this search as an alert every e.g. 5 minutes on a timeframe of 5 minutes having a very quick answer. In this way you almost immediately have an alert when a server is down.

How do you write a query in Splunk?

Splunk search comamnds / Splunk search examples : ... .
Search box - we usually enter the search keyword i.e. username/error code/event code in search box for which we need logs..
Time range picker - Select the time range and select time range for which you need to search logs.Shorter the time range faster will be searching..

How do I search Splunk?

Click Search in the App bar to start a new search. Type buttercup in the Search bar. When you type a few letters into the Search bar, the Search Assistant shows you terms in your data that match the letters that you type in. Click Search in the App bar to start a new search.