Best way to exclude specific combinations from results

[gdavid]

I have a report that i get and it contains specific sets of data results i want to exclude:
ex:

Group Name, Who Change It, Who Changed in the Group, Add/Removed

i want to exclude results for a specific set of Group Name, Who Change It & Who Changed in the Group

My AD Group1 , admin1, user1
My AD Group2 , admin1, user2
My AD Group3 , admin2, user2

what is the best scalable way to do this, just curious if there is a better way than make my query a page long and adding in the exclusion sets there.

[lfedak_splunk]

Hey @gdavid, if DalJeanis solved your problem, please don't forget to accept an answer! You can upvote posts as well. (Karma points will be awarded for either action.) Happy Splunking!

[DalJeanis · Accepted solution]

You can just put the exclusion sets into a lookup table myexclusion.csv with the fields group user1 user2 excludereason

your query 
| fields group user1 user2 some other stuff 
| lookup myexclusion.csv group user1 user2 OUTPUT excludereason
| where isnull(excludereason)

See the lookup command for details on how to look things up when the name of the external field does not match the name of the lookup key field(s).

http://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/SplunkCloud/6.6.1/SearchReference/Lookup

I believe if the user1 field in the lookup is named "foo" in the event, then the syntax is

| lookup mylookup.csv   user1 as foo   OUTPUT bar

[gdavid]

Thanks, i was looking into how to do this with a lookup and your example helped clear up a bunch of questions.
FYI, excludereason is key 🙂

[DalJeanis]

@gdavid - True. I believe there are other ways to figure out if it was a match, but that's the easy one for me.