Can I get the instance.cfg GUID for an indexed event?

[jimcroft]

Hi all

I'm trying to deal with an issue where hostnames are not unique but are forwarding to the same Splunk indexer.

I know every Splunk instance should have a unique GUID. Is there a way of finding the GUID of the Splunk instance that generated an event?

Thanks

Jim

[martin_mueller]

I'm fairly certain the forwarder's GUID isn't stored for an event.

If you're flexible about your configuration and not worried about mild performance impacts you could however create your own GUID storage.
Here's a rough draft:

• Change every forwarder's host from <oldhost> to <oldhost>---<GUID>
• Use transforms.conf to extract <GUID> from the host field and write it to an indexed field called GUID
• Use transforms.conf to revert the host to <oldhost>

That should be transparent to your existing reports/alerts.

[jimcroft]

We're using a mix. I know to use transforms like this we'll need to replace the universals with heavies but that's not a major hurdle.

[martin_mueller]

Are you using universal or heavy forwarders?

[jimcroft]

Thanks! I'd just started reading up on indexed fields. The performance hit warning is a concern but certainly a good place to start and we can test the impact.

What I was also thinking, instead of changing hostnames which can't happen here for various reasons, is something like this in transforms.conf...

[] <--- empty or perhaps source::* whatever to make this match all events
REGEX = .*
FORMAT = guid::""
WRITE_META = true

The ID here would be hardcoded into the conf file rather than using $1 from a regex match. Does that sound like a sensible option? Thanks again.