topic Changing the now() reference point before running a saved search in Splunk Search

Changing the now() reference point before running a saved search

Kindred — Tue, 03 Jan 2017 07:09:56 GMT

Is it possible to change the value of now (or the reference point it uses) so that I can back-date and run a saved search that uses a relative time window? As an example, say there is a saved search that contains:

earliest=-1h latest=now | stats count by host

In this case I can't change the saved search, but I'd like to run that saved search for say 2016-01-01 01:00. Can I tell the saved search to use that specific time as the reference point of now?

I'm running the search via web export ( /servicesNS/<name>/<app>/search/jobs/export), so curious if there could be a request parameter I could set or something?

Re: Changing the now() reference point before running a saved search

lguinn2 — Tue, 03 Jan 2017 07:55:16 GMT

You can't change the value of "now" - it is actually not the current time, but the time when the search started running.

But you can use an absolute time instead of a relative time for earliest and latest. Take a look at the topic Specify time modifiers in your search in the documentation. For example, you could do this

earliest=1/1/2016:0:0:0 latest=1/1/2016:23:59:59

Since you are writing code, you could just do the appropriate time math in your code...

Re: Changing the now() reference point before running a saved search

Kindred — Tue, 03 Jan 2017 22:46:30 GMT

As I mentioned I can't change the saved search, and it was only an example to make the point. There's actually hundreds of saved searches that use relative time periods and various calculations using now(), many of them using summary indexes, which is why I was directly asking about the reference point used by now so that I wouldn't be modifying the searches.

If there was a way to change where now started from, all these reports could be very easily backfilled.

I may be going off on a tangent anyway, is it even possible to run a scheduled search remotely that is set to summary index?

Re: Changing the now() reference point before running a saved search

dvb — Tue, 29 Sep 2020 21:19:38 GMT

For the backfill case you can just use fill_summary_index.py and tell it over which timerange it should run the searches. See
http://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/7.1.3/Knowledge/Managesummaryindexgapsandoverlaps#Use_the_backfill_script_to_add_other_data_or_fill_summary_index_gaps