Earliest particular event after another event

[Samslara]

I have a problem with how to write a splunk query for my use. I'm trying to fetch values from an event where that event is the earliest one after another event. For example, given the sample data below, I'm trying to find the earliest activity=middle after an activity=start. Since there's two activity=middle I want the earliest and then fetch out the payload, which is in this case 1. How should I approach this?

data:

2011-01-01T12:00:00.000-0800 activity=start Correlation-ID=100001
2011-01-01T12:00:01.000-0800 activity=middle payload=1 Correlation-ID=100001
2011-01-01T12:00:02.000-0800 activity=middle payload=2 Correlation-ID=100001

[kristian_kolb]

Well, if the log is no more complicated than your example, you could try with;

source=<your source> | reverse | dedup activity, Correlation_ID | stats values(payload) by Correlation_ID

Note that the underscores are intentional from me. Splunk likes it better that way. 🙂

hope this helps,

Kristian