Source type websphere_activity

[matthewcanty]

Hi,

The source type for one of our hosts - HOST A - recently changed to websphere_activity. The source is log file data, we have not specified the source type in inputs.conf.

An identical setup - HOST B, same server image, just a different log file name - is giving us the source type as expected. Which is the log file name with extension and path trimmed.

Any idea why this might have started happening? Looking back at what changes we have made there is nothing related to source type.

Having a look at the documentation it mentions that Splunk will automatically categorise websphere_activity when it sees it. However both our log file contents - both HOST A and HOST B have the same format. So why is this issue not effecting HOST B?

Also note that any changes we make to Splunk configurations affect both servers.

Thanks for any help.

Matt

[kristian_kolb · Accepted solution]

Cant really why that happened, but splunk will try to assign a sourcetype it sees fit, if you don't do it. Maybe the log file content changed in some way that caused this to trigger.

Question - why didn't you specify a sourcetype? A lot of things are usually dependent on correct sourcetyping - field extractions, eventtypes, saved searches etc etc.

In order to 'get your old sourcetype back' so-to-speak, you should look up sourcetype renaming in the docs.

/K