How to track the state of an object in Splunk for use in grouping events?

[motobeats]

I am trying to figure out how we can track the state of some object in Splunk and use that state to group the objects in historical searches.

An example: I want to track the disk errors reported by VMs grouped by the hypervisor they are on at the time. If this was just for real-time, I would use a lookup table, but I don't know how to approach this problem if I want to check errors over the last week and the VMs are dynamically moving from one hypervisor to another. I can get the event logs to follow the movements, but don't know how to apply that to a follow on search.

[somesoni2 · Accepted solution]

I believe what you want can be achieved by using Timebased lookup, where it's possible to attaché the state based on the time period in which the event occurred. See more information here

http://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/6.2.5/Knowledge/Addfieldsfromexternaldatasources#Set_up_...

[motobeats]

This is what my research turned up too. Thanks for the confirmation. Plan to try the approach in the future.