Alerting

Defining standards for using Splunk as an Error Handling tool

cwcoleman
Engager

I am working on a standards document for my team. It will define how best to use Splunk in regards to error handling.

I've started with the Splunk Logging Best Practices. http://dev.splunk.com/view/logging-best-practices/SP-CAAADP6

Is there any other documentation that anyone has created for this purpose? Mine will be directed towards our Java Development team. Although our Application Administrators (DEVOPS) will also be relying on it.

Notifications are a major topic I'm looking for advice on. Today we use some 'Alerts' that send email but they could be improved. Is there a best practice for creating logs that key alerts?

What about severity levels? Is this entirely application specific? Do you use a certain key=value that identifies the type of failure and write Alerts based on this data?

Thanks!

0 Karma
1 Solution

yannK
Splunk Employee
Splunk Employee

You want :

  1. a timestamp on the first line.
  2. key=values or key="value on a sentence" fields (easier to be automatically detected)
  3. fit in the defaults event parsing limits :
  • 10000 characters per line, and 255 lines per multiline events for the defaults
  • Otherwise, define a custom sourcetype with larger limits.

for severity, you can use the basic syslog DEBUG/INFO/WARN/ERROR/FATAL ...
or use an integers scale (that are easier to filter with a simple condition severity>2)

View solution in original post

yannK
Splunk Employee
Splunk Employee

You want :

  1. a timestamp on the first line.
  2. key=values or key="value on a sentence" fields (easier to be automatically detected)
  3. fit in the defaults event parsing limits :
  • 10000 characters per line, and 255 lines per multiline events for the defaults
  • Otherwise, define a custom sourcetype with larger limits.

for severity, you can use the basic syslog DEBUG/INFO/WARN/ERROR/FATAL ...
or use an integers scale (that are easier to filter with a simple condition severity>2)

cwcoleman
Engager

Great. These are all helpful items. I'll be adding each to my specification.

0 Karma
Get Updates on the Splunk Community!

Splunk Observability Cloud's AI Assistant in Action Series: Auditing Compliance and ...

This is the third post in the Splunk Observability Cloud’s AI Assistant in Action series that digs into how to ...

Splunk Community Badges!

  Hey everyone! Ready to earn some serious bragging rights in the community? Along with our existing badges ...

What You Read The Most: Splunk Lantern’s Most Popular Articles!

Splunk Lantern is a Splunk customer success center that provides advice from Splunk experts on valuable data ...