Similar events

[Henkis]

Hello, I am quite a new user of splunk and have a question.

Is there any way of having splunk to match data that is somewhat similar? What I would like to do is to have a summary count of all syslog events, they can contain different data (host names, user names, addresses). Do I have to try to find fields and use them or is there any easier way?

Thanks

[ziegfried]

Your best bet is to use the punct field which is the pattern of the event. You can read more about this field here: http://www.splunk.com/base/Documentation/4.2.2/User/UseDefaultAndInternalFields#punct

For example:

sourcetype=syslog | stats count first(_raw) as event by punct | table count event | sort -count