I have a splunk dashboard with list of hosts as user inputs, but the user wants all the hosts in the input list to show up in the dashboard irrespective of the search returns data or not so that they can identify the list of the hosts which didn't write any logs during the search time. How to achieve the same. Appreciate any help here.
You are essentially saying "tell me all the dogs that you didn't hear barking" which doesn't really make sense. You have to keep up with infinite history so that you capture a time when every dog barked at least once. This general problem/solution is sometimes known as sentinel
. Check out this conference slide deck to see how most of us use a dynamic lookup for this:
https://conf.splunk.com/session/2015/conf2015-LookupTalk.pdf
What query you are using now for host list?