How to send month old logs to Splunk via oneshot and maintain their correct timestamp if I currently have DATETIME_CONFIG=CURRENT in props.conf?

[janderson19]

Hello all,

I've been indexing Infoblox DHCP and DNS queries for a couple of months now. Because of the amount of logs we're getting, we syslog all of our data to a log collector, and forward it on to Splunk using a Universal Forwarder, in case we should ever need any old logs for something in the future.

We had some trouble while initially setting this up with Splunk not recognizing the timestamp because it is in the format (Sep 19 12:26:35), and a Splunk Technician suggested we set the timestamp to Current Time in Props.conf. This wasn't a problem until now, but we need to add some older data back in to Splunk via a oneshot, for a report counting the number of events per month, so setting the timestamp for data that is a month or so old to today's date wouldn't be useful to us.

Is there any way I can make the timestamp set itself to the correct day/time?

[woodcock]

For the oneshot via file, have you tried this in props.conf?

TIME_FORMAT = %b %d %H:%M:%S

For the real-time ingestion, many people universalize DNS logging (and make them CIM-compliant) by ditching the vendor's logging and sniffing the wire with stream. This is an EXCELLENT solution and would mean that if you switch DNS vendors, you will not have to do anything to keep it logging to Splunk! Here is a good blog about it:

http://www.rfaircloth.com/2015/11/06/get-started-with-splunk-app-stream-6-4-dns/