Getting Data In

"Splunk could not get the description for this event" - SplunkUniversalForwarders, versions 4.2 thru 5.0.1

rgcox1
Communicator

I am getting a high incidence rate of "Splunk could not get the description for this event."
All forwarders are SplunkUniversalForwarders, versions 4.2 thru 5.0.1.
Yesterday I got these results from my Linux 4.3.2 indexer:

                                Servers with
Splunk Universal  Servers with  "Splunk Could   
Forwarder Ver.    WinEvents OK  not get desc"  Total
   4.2                 27           21           48
   4.2.2                4            2            6
   4.3.1                1            -            1
   4.3.2                4            8           12
   5.0.1              172           40          212
Total                 208           71          279

Since the results were so scattered among the forwarder versions, I upgraded the indexer to 5.0.2.

As the indexer is a Linux box, and I know the event descriptions are extracted from the DLL’s on the clients, I really didn’t expect to see a change. However, since the change I now have 151 servers with “could not get” — over twice what I had yesterday before upgrading the indexer. Now over 75% of my windows events contain “Splunk could not get the description for this event.”

The majority of the events are from the security logs, but there is also a significant number of events from the system and application event logs.

Descriptions are present when viewed via event viewer on servers in most cases. In a few cases applications do not put descriptions into the application log.

A spotcheck of some of the affected servers shows that msaudite.dll file and the security subkey under hklm\system\currentcontrolset\services\eventlog\security are present.

Operating systems are also a mix — 78 of the effected machines are Server 2008, the rest 2003.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Tags (1)
0 Karma

AaronMoorcroft
Communicator

I had this same issue, it came down to being the version of the forwarder 4.3.2

4.3.2 has a known bug and can cause this issue, to resolve this I had to upgrade all my forwarders from this version to 5.0.1

0 Karma
Get Updates on the Splunk Community!

Splunk Observability Cloud's AI Assistant in Action Series: Auditing Compliance and ...

This is the third post in the Splunk Observability Cloud’s AI Assistant in Action series that digs into how to ...

Splunk Community Badges!

  Hey everyone! Ready to earn some serious bragging rights in the community? Along with our existing badges ...

What You Read The Most: Splunk Lantern’s Most Popular Articles!

Splunk Lantern is a Splunk customer success center that provides advice from Splunk experts on valuable data ...