Searching indexes by Deployment Client Name

[pmdba]

In a network with up to 150 deployment clients (all UF), is there a way to search indexes for all data from a particular deployment client name or server class? I am trying to create dashboards and reports for classes of servers that support specific applications or computing environments. Our host names change periodically and I am trying to avoid maintaining long (and potentially inaccurate) static lists of server names in tags.

[martin_mueller · Accepted solution]

If your hostnames change over time then you'll need to maintain the historic mapping deployment client name -> hostname, for example in a lookup. You can use this as a data source to build a search that can fill the lookup automatically:

| rest /services/deployment/server/clients | table clientName hostname

See http://blogs.splunk.com/2011/01/11/maintaining-state-of-the-union/ for maintaining such a lookup.
You could then use the lookup to load all the recent hostnames for a given deployment client name and use that in your search.
Note, an inputs.conf stanza can list any hostname, it does not need to match with the hostname given to the deployment server.

[somesoni2]

Give this a try.

|eventcount summarize=false index=* | table index | map maxsearches=1000 search="|metadata type=hosts index=$index$ | table host | eval index=\"$index$\""

This will give mapping of host with index on which they write/send data.