Splunk Search

Transaction failures

twinspop
Influencer

Trying to get a transaction search to work. The transaction is logged in 2 different log sources, with the matching field named differently in each. I use rename to match them up. The DXI events have CORRELATIONID, the sendMessage events have msgid.

I manually found 1 that I know exists and searched for its GUID explicitly, along with the 2 identifiers I'll use in the generic search, and piped them into transaction. The maxspan is 130m because the test transaction takes about 123m to complete.

(DXI OR sendMessage) 652F5692-5F3F-3434-F47B-180BA1CBDDEF | rename CORRELATIONID as msgid | transaction msgid keepevicted=true maxspan=130m

1 transaction returned with an eventcount of 2. Exactly the result I expected. Now let's remove the GUID and see all of them:

DXI OR sendMessage | rename CORRELATIONID as msgid | transaction msgid keepevicted=true maxspan=130m

Nope. Not even the test case above is matched. Same time frame searched. What am I missing? There are ~ 90k msgid matches in the target time frame. Too many to run a transaction against with defaults limits set?

Thanks

Tags (1)
0 Karma
1 Solution

gkanapathy
Splunk Employee
Splunk Employee

Yes. Try setting the maxopentxn parameter as a transaction argument. By default, it will only leave open 5000 transactions. Feel free to raise it to several hundred thousand or higher. You might also want to raise maxopenevents.

Also, if you just want the eventcount or some other fields in the events, rather than the full event, use stats:

 ... | stats count as evencount, max(_time) as endtime, min(_time) as starttime, first(otherfield) as otherfield by msgid

I'm assuming that since msgids are GUIDs, the maxspan doesn't matter at all, and could be infinite.

View solution in original post

gkanapathy
Splunk Employee
Splunk Employee

Yes. Try setting the maxopentxn parameter as a transaction argument. By default, it will only leave open 5000 transactions. Feel free to raise it to several hundred thousand or higher. You might also want to raise maxopenevents.

Also, if you just want the eventcount or some other fields in the events, rather than the full event, use stats:

 ... | stats count as evencount, max(_time) as endtime, min(_time) as starttime, first(otherfield) as otherfield by msgid

I'm assuming that since msgids are GUIDs, the maxspan doesn't matter at all, and could be infinite.

twinspop
Influencer

Excellent. Thanks.

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!

Data Management Digest – August 2026

MichelleCorpora_1-1788182384472.png Welcome to the August 2026 edition of Data Management Digest! August was a ...

Your Feedback. Our Roadmap. Visit the PX Feedback Booth at .conf26

You use Splunk every day, come and help shape what's next.  Save Your Seat: Product-Focused Sessions at ...

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 ...