Linemerging timer?

[bojanz]

Does Splunk have an internal timer when doing line merging?

For example, if I'm doing line merging (SHOULD_LINEMERGE=true) with correct date parsing field, and events start flowing in, what happens if there is a long pause (i.e. 15 seconds) in the source application before creating the log that the Universal forwarder reads.

For example, something like this (time in first column is added by me to show when the line happened):

10:00:00 Log first line
10:00:00 Log second line (same event)
10:00:18 Log third line (same event, but the app logged this 18 sec later)

How long does Splunk wait to concatenate lines into single events?

[sdaniels]

This might be a useful setting for you in this case.

Inputs.conf.spec:

time_before_close =
* Modtime delta required before Splunk can close a file on EOF.
* Tells the system not to close files that have been updated in past seconds.
* Defaults to 3

[bojanz]

Looks interesting, I'll test it and report back 🙂