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Why are some of the events garbled with "\x00"?

elusive
Splunk Employee
Splunk Employee

I am indexing some logs and I see some events are filled with "\x00" while some other events are indexed correctly.

1 Solution

elusive
Splunk Employee
Splunk Employee

Such behavior is observed when Unix Splunk instance is indexing mounted Windows logs. Windows has a unique way of logging which Unix instance is not aware of causing to index with nulls "\x00". When indexing Windows logs such as iis, exchange, domain controller, and so on, install Splunk as a forwarder on the Windows box and have it forward to Unix Splunk indexer.

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Jason
Motivator

Nope. UTF-16 turned a lot of the text into asian characters.

0 Karma

Jason
Motivator

I'm seeing an input from windows onto unix having \x00 and some other unknown characters interspersed with the data. Is UTF-16 the answer to this?

0 Karma

jrodman
Splunk Employee
Splunk Employee

Ideally, if you are having this symptom, you should be clear about the pattern of null characters (\x00). Are they interleaved with the expected data? Do they come in small bursts (ten bytes or so)? Are there several kilobytes worth of nulls all at once?

0 Karma

Chris_R_
Splunk Employee
Splunk Employee

This also happens sometimes when the data your indexing is encoded with a different character set such as UTF-16

You can specify the charset in your props.conf
[somesourcetype]
CHARSET = UTF-16

sshres5
Communicator

So, do we create props.conf on Forwarder TA or Indexer TA?

0 Karma

elusive
Splunk Employee
Splunk Employee

Such behavior is observed when Unix Splunk instance is indexing mounted Windows logs. Windows has a unique way of logging which Unix instance is not aware of causing to index with nulls "\x00". When indexing Windows logs such as iis, exchange, domain controller, and so on, install Splunk as a forwarder on the Windows box and have it forward to Unix Splunk indexer.

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