New to Summary indexing

[macadminrohit]

Hi Splunkers,

I am pretty new to the concept of Summary indexing, would like some more detailed explanation with examples of why Summary indexing is used. My broad understanding is that Summary indexing is having the data which is being run as a report after every scheduled interval of time so that everytime large datasets is not being retrieved from the main index when only a subset of data is required.

But few of my questions :

1) In almost all of the dashboards, we are using summary indices but i am not sure what is the underline search or reporting query on those summary indices. I need to get more details on those summary indices so that i can easily analyse the data coming out from there.

Any help is highly appreciated.

[ChrisG]

There is extensive documentation on summary indexes, starting with Use summary indexing for increased reporting efficiency in the Knowledge Manager Manual. The topics that follow that one provide additional detail about configuring and managing summary indexes, with examples. I just want to make sure you have read those, in case it helps inform your question.

[philipmattocks]

Agree with Chris about reading the documentation, but to answer your sepcific question, if you click on the 'Open in Search' button on one of your panels that uses a summary search, a new window will open with the underlying search. The value of source in the query will correspond to the name of the underlying report, which should be listed in Settings>Searches, reports and alerts.

Hope that helps,

Phil