Knowledge Management

What is the best way to check the sourcetype?

nathanlhopkins
Path Finder

If I have a file I wish splunk to consume what is the best way to identify it's sourcetype or closest match?

Is data preview able to help?

Tags (2)
0 Karma

martin_mueller
SplunkTrust
SplunkTrust

Yep, you can throw it into the data preview to get a first idea of what splunk would make of it and to start working on the settings you need if splunk cannot understand specifics such as timestamps or event braking out of the box.

martin_mueller
SplunkTrust
SplunkTrust

There are many ways to mess up the configuration. Does the data get the correct sourcetype in the inputs.conf on the forwarder? Is the sourcetype fully defined in props.conf on the indexer?

To ease debugging, do post both configuration extracts.

0 Karma

nathanlhopkins
Path Finder

Many thanks, how obvious are these? - when I'm doing data preview I can't seem to spot any issues however when I enable the forwarder I see Failed to parse timestamp errors

0 Karma

martin_mueller
SplunkTrust
SplunkTrust

Yeah, it does.

0 Karma

nathanlhopkins
Path Finder

Many thanks - does the Data preview screen give any indication of potential "Failed to parse timestamp" errors?

0 Karma
Get Updates on the Splunk Community!

Splunk Decoded: Service Maps vs Service Analyzer Tree View vs Flow Maps

It’s Monday morning, and your phone is buzzing with alert escalations – your customer-facing portal is running ...

What’s New in Splunk Observability – September 2025

What's NewWe are excited to announce the latest enhancements to Splunk Observability, designed to help ITOps ...

Fun with Regular Expression - multiples of nine

Fun with Regular Expression - multiples of nineThis challenge was first posted on Slack #regex channel ...