My Firewall guys run this report every day to get data out of the firewall
index="firewall" source_zone_name="*" destination_zone_name="*" policy_name="*" | stats count by "source_zone_name", "destination_zone_name", "policy_name" | sort "source_zone_name", "destination_zone_name", "policy_name"
I ran this report for 1 minute of time in the recent past in "Fast Mode" and it took more than 1 minute to get the return.
The 24 hour report takes almost 7 hours to run and returned 25M records from 195M records and shows 1330 resultant rows
I don't know what would be the best way to set this up to have the lowest impact on the system so that they could login and get the report whenever they like without taking too much time.
Also they manually combine the daily reports into one large report for monthly activity.
I would definitely go with a Summary Index because you are doing multiple roll-ups (daily/monthly). You will find incredible speedups using Summary Index.
Hello
I will go with the Report Acceleration feature, you could just accelerate the last day or last week to save disk if you want. With that feature on that report will load much faster.
If you don't want to spend resources continuously, you also could schedule the query at midnight so they get the report loaded when they arrive at work
Regards
FWIW, there is a topic in the Knowledge Manager Manual that describes the differences between the three ways to accelerate searching using data summaries, with some guidance about when to use which one: http://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/6.2.2/Knowledge/Aboutsummaryindexing.