Trouble connecting Splunk to my app’s streaming logs — any setup guidance?

[Ananyabachan]

Hi everyone,
I’m new to Splunk and trying to set up log monitoring for a small streaming app   I manage. The app generates logs in real time (JSON format), and I want to visualize them in Splunk for debugging and performance insights.

I’ve installed Splunk Enterprise on my server, but I’m a bit confused about:

1. The best way to forward logs from my app (HTTP Event Collector vs. Universal Forwarder?)

2. How to structure the data inputs so I can build dashboards for error rates and streaming stats

Could someone please guide me on the best practice for this kind of setup or share a simple example configuration?

Thanks in advance!

Ananya

[livehybrid]

Hi @Ananyabachan 

How does your app generate the logs? Is this to a file on your server or do you send this from the client/server to a remote endpoint? If the latter then HEC might be a good option for this, however if it logs to a file on disk then you should probably look at creating a "monitor" stanza in your Universal Forwarder (UF) to pick up these files. See https://help.splunk.com/en/splunk-enterprise/get-started/get-data-in/9.4/get-data-from-files-and-dir... for more info.

Splunk usually does a pretty good job of parsing JSON logs so I'd start by setting this up and then start searching the data in Splunk UI to get a feel for how you might like to present it. Ultimately the searches required for your dashboard will depend entirely on the fields within the data. I'd recommend checking out the Splunk tutorial (https://help.splunk.com/en/splunk-enterprise/get-started/search-tutorial/10.0/introduction/about-the...) if you are new to Splunk and also checking out the free training courses as this is great place to start learning how to write the searches you will need (https://www.splunk.com/en_us/training/free-courses/overview.html)

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