topic Re: tstats behaviour change in Splunk 6.6, expected change or bug ? in Splunk Search

tstats behaviour change in Splunk 6.6, expected change or bug ?

guilmxm — Tue, 02 May 2017 20:03:13 GMT

Hi !

Splunk 6.6 being out officially, I had the (bad) surprise to discover is very annoying change in tstats command behaviour.

Doing an operation over a non existing field result in a "nan" value instead of a null field.

The following search can be used to demonstrate:

| tstats count as count max(foo) as foo WHERE index=_internal

With 6.5.3 and previous, the result would have been:

Since 6.6, it is now:

So in what could be a problem ? Well it changes the behaviour on any condition using an "isnull" or "isnotnull" condition, such as:

| tstats count as count max(foo) as foo WHERE index=_internal
| eval good=if(isnotnull(foo), foo, count)

Would now use the "bad" value instead of the "good" value, because it is not null any more as it now equals to the "nan" string.
Off course, the query can be changed to something like:

| tstats count as count max(foo) as foo WHERE index=_internal
| eval good=if(isnum(foo), foo, count)

This is however a serious change in the tstats behaviours, and has side effects on any stuff doing such job and assuming that the field will be null if it is not available in the data.

Is that an expected change ? A bug ?

Thanks!

Re: tstats behaviour change in Splunk 6.6, expected change or bug ?

jkat54 — Wed, 03 May 2017 01:05:35 GMT

I'm going with bug. I've seen nans before and it wa always my fault and not expected 😉

Re: tstats behaviour change in Splunk 6.6, expected change or bug ?

mattymo — Wed, 03 May 2017 17:47:42 GMT

Thanks as always for your rockstar work, Guilhem!

I have filed a bug and made internal devs aware. Stay tuned!

Re: tstats behaviour change in Splunk 6.6, expected change or bug ?

guilmxm — Thu, 25 May 2017 19:06:32 GMT

This issue has been fixed with Splunk maintenance release 6.6.1 (SPL-141863, SPL-141584)

Re: tstats behaviour change in Splunk 6.6, expected change or bug ?

gjanders — Thu, 25 May 2017 22:42:50 GMT

Are you referring to 6.6.1 ? Not 6.1.1?

Re: tstats behaviour change in Splunk 6.6, expected change or bug ?

guilmxm — Thu, 25 May 2017 22:47:53 GMT

A typo off course, thank you 😉

Corrected.

Re: tstats behaviour change in Splunk 6.6, expected change or bug ?

mattymo — Fri, 26 May 2017 01:05:58 GMT

Happy to have that one in my Jira scrapbook! 😉

Thanks for finding it early and reporting @guilmxm

Re: tstats behaviour change in Splunk 6.6, expected change or bug ?

guilmxm — Fri, 26 May 2017 07:46:05 GMT

And more than happy to contribute to the quality of Splunk 😉