I want to create a bar plot which displays the total number of events on the 1st of every month for the last 12 months. I can't query data for the last 12 months because search timeouts in 5 minutes as we have billions of events.
Is there a way we can do this using timechart or other mechanism?
Thanks
If you are looking only for the total number of events, you could use tstats. Searching through metadata tends to be quite fast, but could still time-out.
Another possibility would be using summaries. You could schedule a search to run every day/week/month to run for the specific period and have the visualization search run on the summary data.
You can find more about summary indexing here: Use summary indexing for increased search efficiency - Splunk Documentation
You could try using metasearch if all you want is counts based on a restricted set of fields
metasearch - Splunk Documentation
You could also restrict your time period to the first of every month
index ... (earliest=-12mon@d latest=-12mon@d+1d) OR (earliest=-11mon@d latest=-11mon@d+1d) OR ...
You could create summary index entries for each month and query those.