Splunk Search

How do I search using field components?

steveta_uk
Explorer

I'm a newbie to Splunk, and I'm having difficulty with field definitions and searches.

My input data (from syslog) contains one field of a form such as ":ABC1234I:" which means component "ABC" generate log message ID 1234 at level I (info). This is parsed fairly easily using this REGEX:

(?i):(?P[A-Z][A-Z][A-Z])(?P[\d][\d][\d][\d])(?P[DWIEF]):

The search shows Logger, Logno, and Sev under "interesting fields" as expected, and shows the set of values found for each one. All this seems fine.

But when I select one of the values under "Logger", I get no matches, despite it already listing some 26,000+ hits for that particular value.

The search term in this instance is

sourcetype="syslog" Logger="CGP"

What am I doing wrong?

Tags (2)
0 Karma

Ayn
Legend

What version of Splunk are you running? Your problem sounds very much like what is described here: http://blogs.splunk.com/2011/10/07/cannot-search-based-on-an-extracted-field/
But it's supposed to be fixed in 4.3.

0 Karma

Ayn
Legend

Interesting. Something for the Splunk people to have a look at. If your issue is solved, could you mark my answer as accepted? Thanks!

0 Karma

steveta_uk
Explorer

The solution described using that link worked. Thanks for the quick response.

I am using a fresh install of 4.3.1. I can move fields.conf out of the way and rerun a search and it will fail, so clearly the issue still exists with 4.3.1, with the same solution.

0 Karma
Got questions? Get answers!

Join the Splunk Community Slack to learn, troubleshoot, and make connections with fellow Splunk practitioners in real time!

Meet up IRL or virtually!

Join Splunk User Groups to connect and learn in-person by region or remotely by topic or industry.

Get Updates on the Splunk Community!

Developer Spotlight with Denis Gladkikh

From Splunk Engineer to Kubernetes App Builder Denis GladkikhWhat happens when a lifelong developer turns a ...

Governing Enterprise AI, Bringing Cisco Telemetry Home, and More from Splunk Lantern

Splunk Lantern is Splunk’s customer success center that provides practical guidance from Splunk experts on key ...

Agentic SOC Triage: Investigating Splunk ES Notables with MCP Server and a Local LLM

The Problem: Too Many Alerts, Too Little Context Security operations teams running Splunk Enterprise Security ...