Alerting

Alert using calendar arithmetic

Branden
Builder

Hi. We a Dashboard that informs us of the date a service account password was changed/reset. Passwords need to be reset no later than every 700 days, but we'd like Splunk to alert us 6 months prior to that deadline.

Our date field looks like this:

  2019-11-15T15:27:42.416732Z

From that date, we need to alert when that account password is 520 days old (700 days minus 6 months/180 days). So in the above example, we need to receive an alert on April 18, 2021, to remind us to schedule a password reset for that account.

We are getting the account name date of the last password set from Active Directory, in case that matters.

In other words, is there a way to do "Calendar arithmetic" in Splunk? I have no idea where to even begin with this.

Thank you!

0 Karma

richgalloway
SplunkTrust
SplunkTrust

Timestamp math is easy. The trick is to convert the timestamp into integer (epoch) form first.

... | eval epoch=strptime(accountPassword, "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%5N%Z")
| eval alertEpoch=epoch + (86400 * 520)
| eval alertTime = strftime(alertEpoch, "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%5N%Z")
---
If this reply helps you, Karma would be appreciated.
0 Karma

Branden
Builder

I can actually calculate the epoch time six months in the future from the date of the password set:

  | eval pwDate=strptime(pwdLastSet,"%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%3N") | eval sixMonthsAhead=relative_time(pwDate, "+520d@d") | table cn, pwdLastSet, sixMonthsAhead

But I can't seem to get an alert to trigger once that date arrives...

0 Karma
Got questions? Get answers!

Join the Splunk Community Slack to learn, troubleshoot, and make connections with fellow Splunk practitioners in real time!

Meet up IRL or virtually!

Join Splunk User Groups to connect and learn in-person by region or remotely by topic or industry.

Get Updates on the Splunk Community!

All Work and No Play? Not at .conf26! Unwind at These Evening Events

Between hands-on technical sessions, keynote reveals, and diving into live architectures, .conf26 is packed ...

Join the Hackathon at .conf26 and build a No-Code AI agent

Join us for the AI Agent Buildathon, an in-person, three-hour hands-on Hackathon where you’ll use Splunk Agent ...

Level Up Your Workflow: Mastering Splunk Cloud Management via Terraform

Tech Talk Recap   From Chaos to Control: Scaling Splunk Cloud with Infrastructure as Code Managing apps in ...