Tags VS lookup tables? - performance wise

[gooza]

Hi,
I'd like to add knowledge to our splunk data and divide ips or computers to different groups like test/production and LAN/DMZ ,
What is the best way to do that with less impact to the search performance?
should I add Tags or is it best to keep different lookup tables ?

Thanks

[Damien_Dallimor]

Just thinking of one such example using lookups...a Splunk client that only had a single Splunk environment for all dev/test/qual/prod data etc... I used a lookup to map hostnames to other host meta data such as whether the host was in a "DEV" environment or "PROD" environment , SLA sev levels, even geo info etc.... With this enriched lookup data in the search results, I was able, for example, to add a selector module to the views to choose which environment you want to look at. Likewise for alerts, I could narrow the scheduled search to only alert on PROD hosts.Works perfectly well and performs good.

[gooza]

OK , thanks Damien, I'll give the lookup tables a try...

[rtadams89 · Accepted solution]

The permissions on tags are difficult to manage in bulk (currently). So if you plan to go through and tag servers as "DMZ", etc, and then expect to be able to quickly allow anyone to search on those tags, you may have a problem. The lookup table would be much easier to maintain. However, from a strictly performance perspective, the tags should be faster when searching.

[gooza]

Thanks , I'll give the lookup tables a try.