Making splunk act like tail -f $file

[dpaper]

Hi,

I'm trying to get Splunk to do the equivalent of a tail -f $file. Specifically what I'm trying to do is get the event output lines to be a lot more compressed and just show the raw text, no parsing, no field picker, no arrows, no splunk time stamps. I don't know how much of this is possible, but some of it might be.

Thanks.

[gkanapathy]

1. Create a search that shows the events you're interested in, e.g., maybe it's just source=/var/log/file.log, or source=*whatever.log | head 500. The search should have a real-time time range.

2. From the actions menu, select "Add to dashboard". Add the search to a new dashboard.

3. Edit the dashboard's View XML, using the event panel as a reference. You won't be able to remove the timestamp or change the spacing or typeface from here. Some things will require an edit of the CSS behind this view.

4. If you prefer, use @Mackenzie's technique of picking out the _raw field and display the results with the <table> panel rather than the <event> panel. You can edit the prefs of this in the view XML as well.

[Mackenzie]

A simple solution that may achieve what you want is:

| fields _raw | eval event=_raw | table event