Monitoring Splunk

Decomposition is not trusted

olopez77
Explorer

I have noticed that Splunkd.log is recording the following error:

web_service.log:2010-06-27 12:21:18,769 ERROR Transformer:91 - Decomposition is not trusted.

What does this error mean?

Tags (2)

sideview
SplunkTrust
SplunkTrust

Short version - dont worry about it its perfectly normal. SplunkWeb took a search string and tried to represent it as component 'intentions' for the form elements on the page to consume. With some searches this can be done and with others it cant.

You may be familiar with 'intentions' already. If not some background is here: http://answers.splunk.com/questions/2879/what-is-an-intention

Intentions are an abstraction that allows the UI to avoid parsing and interpreting the search language.

'decomposition' is the reverse to the normal story of intentions -- this is when Splunk takes a big search and tries to decompose it into an unambiguous set of intentions for the user interface elements to consume. It does this so that if there are complex modules in the page like the report builder modules, those modules may be able to set themselves accordingly.

Sometimes decomposition gives a result that would result in the search being unacceptably rewritten when recomposed back into a string. In this case we dont trust it and we just go with only the undecomposed search.

This is fine because in most cases we dont really need the decomposed intentions anyway. Even report builder will still work without them - this is why you'll sometimes see report builder load in 'advanced' mode and tell you 'this report can only be run in the advanced mode'

We are moving to a much more intuitive, powerful and generally simpler permalinking mechanism in our next major release.

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