What is the benefit of "Apache Web Server" add-on different from Splunk?

[sayz]

What I want to ask is, do we have to use this plugin to monitor Apache logs? What do we lose if we do not use it? What do we win if we use it?

Do you have any advice?

[gjanders · Accepted solution]

The add on provides search time features such as additional field extractions and additional fields related to the common information model.

The add on is not designed to ingest the logs for you, it just provides tags/eventtypes and relevant field extractions for the required source type as per it's documentation

You probably want to ingest the logs with the source type used by the add on, and then use the add on on your search head to provide the relevant field names/tags...

[sayz]

thank you for your answer. but i have one more question.

Is the meaning of "required fields" (mentioned here1) a standard requirement of Apache? or?

[gjanders]

The LogFormat is used to output the access log in Apache, so that is required.

The log format supplied in the documentation is the order in which the Apache add on will expect the log data to appear in the log file.

You can confirm this by looking at the props.conf/transforms.conf inside the application, it will likely be expecting the data to appear in a particular order...(and it will expect information like user agent to be included in the data).