Splunk Answers Content Calendar, June Edition II

[Anam]

Get ready to dive into Splunk Dashboard panels this week! We'll be tackling common questions around customizing the Classic Dashboard Event Panel Table Visualization and understanding how to effectively auto-refresh your entire dashboard.

Getting the Right Columns: Customizing Splunk Classic Dashboard Event Panel Tables?

Splunk Classic Dashboards remain a staple for many users, providing a familiar and flexible way to visualize data. One common element is the "Events Panel," which displays raw events or a structured view of them. When you configure an Events Panel to show data in a table format, you're typically presented with a default set of columns. But what happens when you need more control over which fields appear as headers in that table?

The Problem: Limited Headers in the Events Panel Table

User lcguilfoil recently highlighted a common challenge when working with the Events Panel in a Classic Dashboard. They have their panel set to display events as a table, which is a great way to get a quick overview of the data.

While these are fundamental fields, most Splunk searches involve extracting or identifying many other valuable fields. The user's goal is to include these other fields as columns in the Events Panel table visualization, so they appear as headers alongside the defaults.

The Solution

Thanks to the insights shared by our community experts such as ITWhisperer on the post, lcguilfoil found the fix themselves! It turned out to be simpler than expected: merely adding the necessary fields to the panel's configuration did the trick.

Splunk Dashboard Auto-Refresh: Why One Setting Might Not Rule Them All

Keeping your Splunk dashboards updated with the latest data is often critical for monitoring, analysis, and real-time decision-making. Auto-refresh is the feature that makes this possible, ensuring your visualizations reflect the most current state of your systems. But sometimes, configuring auto-refresh isn't as straightforward as it might seem, especially with the evolution of Splunk's dashboarding capabilities.

The Problem: Seeking a Single Dashboard-Wide Refresh

A Splunk user tgulgund recently reached out with a common goal: they wanted their entire dashboard to refresh automatically at a set interval (every 5 minutes). They are working with a modern Splunk version (9.3.2), have a dashboard with multiple panels, some using chained searches, and are utilizing a global time picker.

Intuitively, they attempted to set a global refresh property, perhaps expecting a single setting to control all panels. They tried adding something like "refresh": 300 (for 300 seconds, or 5 minutes) to their dashboard configuration but found it didn't work as intended.

The Solution

The answer by Prewin27 sheds light on how auto-refresh is handled in modern Splunk dashboards (likely Dashboard Studio, given the context of version 9.3.2 and the JSON configuration mentioned in the solution).

This means that unlike potentially setting a single refresh property at the top level of the dashboard configuration, auto-refresh is managed at a more granular level: the data source.

No Global Setting: The solution confirms that there isn't a simple, single configuration option to make every panel refresh simultaneously via one top-level setting.

Data Source Control: Auto-refresh is tied to the data source that powers a panel (or multiple panels). Each search, each data input defined in the dashboard's source, is a data source.

Configure Individually: To achieve dashboard-wide refresh, you need to go into the dashboard's source code (the JSON) and add the refresh property to the options of each data source you want to auto-refresh.

We are incredibly grateful for the Splunk community experts ITWhisperer and Prewin27 who consistently share their deep knowledge and practical solutions. Your contributions on the forums and beyond are a cornerstone of the community, helping users learn, troubleshoot, and succeed. Thank you for your tireless efforts!

Would you like to feature more solutions like this? Reach out @Anam Siddique on Slack in our Splunk Community Slack workspace to highlight your question, answer, or tip in an upcoming Community Content post! 💡

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