timestamp in file inputs is the wrong format

daverodgers — Thu, 04 Jun 2015 15:11:07 GMT

hi all.

I have searched splunk answers and seen various people commenting on timestamp formats, but I can't find exactly what I'm seeing, so I thought I'd ask the question.

I am trying to create a new file input based on a txt file that gets updated with a timestamped event.

When I preview the file, it highlights the timestamp in my data with a green highlight, which I presume shows me that it has identified the time/date.

I'm in the UK so my data is DD/MM: 01/06/2015 13:58:47

However, on the right hand side of the preview screen where it shows the "event time distribution" as a small graph, the format is MM/DD.

Why is it changing this?

What is more bizarre is that I set up these file inputs last month and they were working fine. Date format was dd/mm etc and I had no problems. But when we ticked over to the 1st of June, literally at midnight. The inputs stopped working.

I don't know of any change to our environment that would cause this. We haven't updated splunk in any way recently. The files are being updated in the same way every 5 minutes, and the raw data in the files is still correct and hasn't changed.

Also, it isn't browser locale related. I am using the same url I always use. I can use it with or without en-gb in the url, and the same happens with these file inputs.

I know this is going to be very hard to provide a solution, but I've checked everything I can think of so I'm just looking for any ideas that I have possibly overlooked.

We are using splunk 6.0.2 Splunk Build196940

thanks guys!

Dave

Re: timestamp in file inputs is the wrong format

richgalloway — Thu, 04 Jun 2015 15:37:17 GMT

Splunk defaults to MM/DD format, but is smart enough to know there is no thirteenth month so "13/05" must be 13 May. Now that day numbers are back in the 1-12 range Splunk again thinks the first number is a month. You can resolve this by putting TIME_FORMAT = %d/%m/%Y %H:%M:%S in the relevant stanza of your props.conf file.

Re: timestamp in file inputs is the wrong format

woodcock — Sat, 06 Jun 2015 06:07:24 GMT

This has been discussed ad-nauseam in this other question (including the answer and many layers of debug):

http://answers.splunk.com/answers/241800/why-am-i-unable-to-search-previously-indexed-data.html#comment-242349

topic Re: timestamp in file inputs is the wrong format in Getting Data In

timestamp in file inputs is the wrong format

Re: timestamp in file inputs is the wrong format

Re: timestamp in file inputs is the wrong format