Example of how to trend unique users over time?

[sloshburch]

Does anyone have examples of how to use Splunk to trend unique users over time?

[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 support teams can summarize the scale and capacity of users accessing applications by analyzing counts of unique client IP addresses over time. After you know the scale and scope of users your applications are reaching, you can forecast growth and set expectations for needs in the future.

Load data

How to implement: This example use case depends on data from application logs and application usage.

Install the Splunk Add-on for Apache Web Server or the Splunk Add-on for Microsoft IIS. Follow the documentation to learn how to install these add-ons. Find the Splunk Add-on for Apache Web Server and the Splunk Add-on for Microsoft IIS on Splunkbase.

Best practice: For all of the data inputs, specify a desired target index to provide a more sustainable practice for data access controls and retention models. By default, Splunk collects the data in the default index named main.

Data check: 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

Monitor the number of different users accessing your web applications over time.

Run the following search.

index=* tag=web

 | timechart dc(src) as "Unique Users"

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.