how to manage a dynamic number of elements in a field

[wsw70]

Hello,

I have the following type of data:

1339099318 403 talkx.l.google.com "Instant Messaging"
1339099322 403 talk.google.com "Instant Messaging;Web Phone"

I mapped the 4 fields to names though props / transforms, so far OK.

The last field is dynamic - it is a concatenation of several possible names (in the case above "Instant Messaging" and "Web Phone"). What I would like to get at the end is a graph which would show the time evolution of the number of hits, broken down by the names above.

Something like

where blue is "Instant Messaging" and orange is "Web Phone" (I do not care about the colors).

The problem (at least for me) is that the number of elements in the last field changes and I do not know their names in advance.
(If I absolutely have to know the names I will find out but I would prefer to anticipate for an unexpected one)

What would be the right way to parse this last field and prepare the name for displaying as above?

Thank you in advance for any pointers!

[kristian_kolb · Accepted solution]

If you have the whole string extracted as a field, e.g. services, you can use the command makemv inline in the search;

... | makemv delim=";" services | timechart c by services

For more info on makemv, please see the docs.

http://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/latest/SearchReference/Makemv

Hope this helps,

Kristian

[kristian_kolb]

You're welcome!

[wsw70]

Perfect - this is exactly what I was looking for, thanks!