Example of how to track application errors?

[sloshburch]

Does anyone have examples of how to use Splunk to track application errors?

[sloshburch · Accepted solution]

The Splunk Product Best Practices team helped produce this response. Read more about example use cases in the Splunk Platform Use Cases manual.

For more information on this and other examples, download the free Splunk Essentials for Infrastructure Troubleshooting and Monitoring app on Splunkbase.

Application development teams need know where their applications experience errors to fix the issue and provide a better user experience. Add web access logs to the Splunk platform to gain valuable insights on page access, including the HTTP response codes. Analyze the response codes and their frequency to identify potential areas for improvement in applications.

Load data

How to implement: This example use case depends on data from web access and error logs.

Install the Splunk Add-on for Apache Web Server or the Splunk Add-on for Microsoft IIS. Find the Splunk Add-on for Apache Web Server and the Splunk Add-on for Microsoft IIS on Splunkbase. You can find installation and configuration instructions in the Details tab of each Splunkbase item.

Run the following search to verify you are searching for normalized web data that is ready for this use case:

earliest=-1day index=* tag=web

| head 10

Get insights

To identify where errors are originating from, run the following search.

index=* tag=web status>=400 

| stats count BY uri_path, status 

| sort limit=20 -count

Best practice: In searches, replace the asterisk in index=* with the name of the index that contains the data. By default, Splunk stores data in the main index. Therefore, index=* becomes index=main. Use the OR operator to specify one or multiple indexes to search. For example, index=main OR index=security. See About managing indexes and How indexing works in Splunk docs for details.

Help

If no results appear, it may be because the add-ons were not deployed to the search heads, so the needed tags and fields are not defined. Deploy the add-ons to the search heads to access the needed tags and fields. See About installing Splunk add-ons in the Splunk Add-ons manual.

For troubleshooting tips that you can apply to all add-ons, see Troubleshoot add-ons in the Splunk Add-ons manual.

For more support, post a question to the Splunk Answers community.