How to show data from external APIs in a Splunk dashboard

[ranjithfs1]

Suppose there is an API endpoint GET example.com/userscount which returns a single integer in its response. I would like to show this value in a 'Single value' panel in a Splunk dashboard. Similarly, I would like to populate a stats table and charts with external data.

Using scripted input appears to be one solution, but is there a better way to do it which doesn't require the data to be stored in Splunk?

[jkat54]

Please see the documentation for "external lookups"

http://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/6.2.0/Knowledge/Addfieldsfromexternaldatasources#Create_...

This uses a script to pull data in at search time vs indexing the data.

[ranjithfs1]

The external scripts seems to take rows with missing fields as input and returns the same rows with the missing fields filled up. In my case, the script should not take any input but return a single number (if it is a single value panel) or a set of rows (if it is a statistics or chart) panel. How can I write a search command for this?