Splunk Enterprise - how does it detect IOWAIT warning or error

[eholz1]

Hello All,

Perhaps I have the 64K $ question. I am trying to understand (better) the IOWAIT warnings and errors.

The yellow and red icons, etc.  I know that IOWAIT can be an issue, and only on Linux based servers.

I will guess that running Splunk Enterprise on a virtual linux machine makes things harder.

I have revised the Health Report Managaer settings per a Splunk forum posting, and the issue is resolved for the most part. I can run an "unreasonable"  search and get the warining icon, and then as the search progresses, the red error icon. I have run some linux commands like iostat,  and iotop while the search is running but do not see any useful data.

I am just curious how Splunk determines the IOWAIT values as part of the health monitoring. I was also wondering if I reset the healh repoting values back to the default, how I might go about reducing the "IOWAIT" characteristic on the Splunk server.

Thanks for any hints or tips

ewholz

[deepakc · Accepted solution]

In terms of how Splunk determines the iowait stats 

Splunk in the background uses REST API for these checks it runs every so often (can't remember the exact times) but collects at regular intervals built in Splunk

#This will shows the various resources on the target Splunk instance (local in this case) 

| rest splunk_server=local /services/server/status/resource-usage/

#this shows the iowait stats on the target splunk instance (local in this case) 

| rest splunk_server=local /services/server/status/resource-usage/iowait 

[eholz1]

Hello deepakc,

Thank you very much for this information. This forum is great. Kudos to you for helping me

understanding the "internals" of Splunk,

eholz1