topic Re: Can I "/dev/null" a sourcetype? in Getting Data In

Can I "/dev/null" a sourcetype?

Steve_Litras — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 03:34:25 GMT

So I need to temporarily free up some indexing license. Rather than tweaking my deployment, I was hoping I could just route a few sourcetypes to /dev/null for a little while. Is there a way I can tell splunk to not index a sourcetype of a list of sourcetypes?

Thanks Steve

Re: Can I "/dev/null" a sourcetype?

ftk — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 04:39:56 GMT

Yes you can by routing the undesired events to the nullQueue. Check this part of the documentation: http://www.splunk.com/base/Documentation/latest/Admin/Routeandfilterdata#Discard_specific_events_and_keep_the_rest

Let's assume you don't want the sourcetype my_sourcetype. On your indexer, set up your props.conf:

[my_sourcetype]
TRANSFORMS-null= setnull

and then in transforms.conf:

[setnull]
REGEX = .
DEST_KEY = queue
FORMAT = nullQueue

You can of course tweak the REGEX to not be as greedy and just throw out specific events. But the example as is will discard everything coming in as the my_sourcetype sourcetype.

Re: Can I "/dev/null" a sourcetype?

Steve_Litras — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 06:58:40 GMT

Worked like a charm! Thanks.