Splunk Search

Can I divide by zero in splunk?

HattrickNZ
Motivator

I was having trouble evaluating a field and I think it was because I was dividing by zero.

This is my solution.

Hope fully it is self explainatory.

Have I understodd this correctly? Have you got a better one/solution?

| makeresults 
      | eval data = "
 1-Sep    657 34 0;
 2-Sep    434 34 0;
     " 
      | makemv delim=";" data
      | mvexpand data
      | rex field=data "(?<Date>\d+-\w+)\s+(?<kpi1>\d+)\s+(?<kpi2>\d+)\s+(?<kpi3>\d+)"
      | fields + Date kpi1 kpi2 kpi3 | fields - _time 
      | eval kpi4=kpi2/kpi3 | rename comment as "kpi4 column will not show up because kpi3 = zero" 
      | eval kpi5=if(kpi3=0,"",kpi2/kpi3) | rename comment  as "kpi5 column will show up because I handle the kpi3=zero and return blank"  |
Tags (2)
0 Karma

koshyk
Super Champion

Your understanding is correct. But I'm not a big fan of "blank" or null, so may be better to evaluate it to a "NotDefined" or a negative integer to make it easier for outcome searches.
And also good to have fillnull for each fields you extract just in case.

| makeresults 
       | eval data = "
  1-Sep    657 34 0;
  2-Sep    434 34 0;
      " 
       | makemv delim=";" data
       | mvexpand data
       | rex field=data "(?<Date>\d+-\w+)\s+(?<kpi1>\d+)\s+(?<kpi2>\d+)\s+(?<kpi3>\d+)"
       | fields + Date kpi1 kpi2 kpi3 | fields - _time 
       | eval kpi4=kpi2/kpi3 | rename comment as "kpi4 column will not show up because kpi3 = zero" 
       | eval kpi5=if(kpi3=0,"NotDefined",kpi2/kpi3) | rename comment  as "kpi5 column will show up because I handle the kpi3=zero and return NotDefined"
0 Karma

DavidHourani
Super Champion

Looks good to me 🙂

0 Karma

goodair
New Member

You have understood it correctly, if the eval fails, it will return null for that evaluation. If all the evals return null for a field, then that field doesn't exist. Your idea for KPI5 is a good way of handling it.

This docs page explains eval, and under the General heading it confirms that division by zero results in a null value:
https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/latest/SearchReference/Eval#General

0 Karma
Get Updates on the Splunk Community!

Splunk Observability for AI

Don’t miss out on an exciting Tech Talk on Splunk Observability for AI!Discover how Splunk’s agentic AI ...

Splunk Enterprise Security 8.x: The Essential Upgrade for Threat Detection, ...

Watch On Demand the Tech Talk, and empower your SOC to reach new heights! Duration: 1 hour  Prepare to ...

Splunk Observability as Code: From Zero to Dashboard

For the details on what Self-Service Observability and Observability as Code is, we have some awesome content ...