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Splunk Search

Cribl Edge supports receiving Splunk search data from Splunk Search.

Type: Pull | TLS Support: Yes | Event Breaker Support: YES

Configuring Cribl Edge to Receive Splunk Search Data
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From the top nav, click Manage, then select a Fleet to configure. Next, you have two options:

To configure via the graphical QuickConnect UI, click Routing > QuickConnect (Stream) or Collect (Edge). Next, click Add Source at left. From the resulting drawer’s tiles, select [Pull > ] Splunk Search. Next, click either Add Destination or (if displayed) Select Existing. The resulting drawer will provide the options below.

Or, to configure via the Routing UI, click Data > Sources (Stream) or More > Sources (Edge). From the resulting page’s tiles or left nav, select [Pull > ] Splunk Search. Next, click New Source to open a New Source modal that provides the options below.

General Settings
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Input ID: Enter a unique name to identify this Splunk Search Source definition.

Cron schedule: Enter a cron expression to define the schedule on which to run this job. Defaults to one run every 15 minutes. The Estimated Schedule below this field shows the next few collection runs, as examples of the cron interval you’ve scheduled.

You enter the Cron schedule expression in UTC time, but the Estimated Schedule examples are displayed in local time.

Search Settings
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Search: Enter the Splunk query. For example: index=myAppLogs level=error channel=myApp OR | mstats avg(myStat) as myStat WHERE index=myStatsIndex.

Search head: Enter the search head base URL. The default is https://localhost:8089.

Earliest: You can enter the earliest time boundary for the search. This maybe be an exact or relative time. For example: 2022-01-14T12:00:00Z or -16m@m.

Latest: You can enter the latest time boundary for the search. This maybe be an exact or relative time. For example: 2022-01-14T12:00:00Z or -16m@m.

Optional Settings
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Tags: Optionally, add tags that you can use to filter and group Sources in Cribl Edge’s Manage Sources page. These tags aren’t added to processed events. Use a tab or hard return between (arbitrary) tag names.

Authentication
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In the Authentication tab, use the buttons to select one of these options:

  • None: Don’t use authentication. Compatible with REST servers like AWS, where you embed a secret directly in the request URL.

  • Basic: Displays Username and Password fields for you to enter HTTP Basic authentication credentials.

  • Basic (credentials secret): Provide username and password credentials referenced by a secret. Select a stored text secret in the resulting Credentials secret drop-down, or click Create to configure a new secret.

  • Bearer Token: Provide the token value configured and generated in Splunk.

  • Bearer Token (text secret): Provide the Bearer Token referenced by a secret. Select a stored text secret in the resulting Token (text  secret) drop-down, or click Create to configure a new secret.

Processing Settings
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Event Breakers
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Event Breaker rulesets: A list of event breaking rulesets that will be applied to the input data stream before the data is sent through the Routes. Defaults to the Splunk Search Ruleset.

Event Breaker buffer timeout: How long (in milliseconds) the Event Breaker will wait for new data to be sent to a specific channel, before flushing out the data stream, as-is, to the Routes. Minimum 10 ms, default 10000 (10 sec), maximum 43200000 (12 hours).

Fields
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In this section, you can add Fields to each event, using Eval-like functionality.

Name: Field name.

Value: JavaScript expression to compute field’s value, enclosed in quotes or backticks. (Can evaluate to a constant.)

Pre-Processing
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In this section’s Pipeline drop-down list, you can select a single existing Pipeline to process data from this input before the data is sent through the Routes.

Advanced Settings
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Search endpoint: Rest API used to conduct a search. Defaults to services/search/jobs/export.

Output mode: Format of the returned output. Defaults to JSON format.To parse the returned JSON, add the Cribl event breaker which parses newline delimited events in the Event Breakers tab.

Events returned from Splunk search can also be returned in the more compact CSV format. To use CSV format, set the Output mode to CSV and specify the CSV event breaker in the Event Breakers tab.

Endpoint parameters: Optional HTTP request parameters to append to the request URL. These refine or narrow the request. Click Add Parameter to add parameters as key-value pairs:

  • Name: Field name.
  • Value: JavaScript expression to compute the field’s value (can be a constant).

Endpoint headers:: Click Add Header to (optionally) add request headers to send to the endpoint, as key-value pairs:

  • Name: Header name.
  • Value: JavaScript expression to compute the header’s value, normally enclosed in backticks (e.g., `${earliest}`). Can also be a constant, enclosed in single quotes ('earliest'). Values without delimiters (e.g., earliest) are evaluated as strings.

Log level: Set the verbosity level for the data collection’s runtime log.

Keep Alive Time (Seconds): How often Workers should check in with the scheduler to keep their job subscription alive. Defaults to 30.

Job timeout: Maximum time a job is allowed to run. Defaults to 0, for unlimited time. Units are seconds if not specified. Sample entries: 30, 45s, 15m.

Worker timeout (periods): The number of Keep Alive Time periods before an inactive Worker will have its job subscription revoked. Defaults to 3.

Request Timeout (secs): Here, you can set a maximum time period (in seconds) for an HTTP request to complete before Cribl Edge treats it as timed out. Defaults to 0, which disables timeout metering.

Round-robin DNS: Toggle on to enable round-robin DNS lookup across multiple IP addresses, IPv4 and IPv6. When a DNS server resolves a Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) to multiple IP addresses, Cribl Edge will sequentially use each address in the order they are returned by the DNS server for subsequent connection attempts.

Environment: If you’re using GitOps, optionally use this field to specify a single Git branch on which to enable this configuration. If empty, the config will be enabled everywhere.

Connected Destinations
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Select Send to Routes to enable conditional routing, filtering, and cloning of this Source’s data via the Routing table.

Select QuickConnect to send this Source’s data to one or more Destinations via independent, direct connections.

Internal Fields
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Cribl Edge uses a set of internal fields to assist in handling of data. These “meta” fields are not part of an event, but they are accessible, and Functions can use them to make processing decisions.

Fields for this Source:

  • __inputId
  • __outputMode

How Cribl Edge Pulls Data
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This Collector-based Source will gather data from the specified Search head URL repeatedly, on the interval specified in the Cron schedule field. A single Worker executes each collection job.

If the Leader goes down, search jobs in progress will complete, but future scheduled searches will not run until the Leader relaunches.

Retry Logic
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If this Collector receives an HTTP 429 or 503 response code, and the retry-after header is present, Cribl Edge will use the header’s delay-seconds or http-date value to determine how long to wait before retrying the request. Cribl Edge will log a warning message with the value retrieved from the header.

If the retry-after header is absent, Cribl Edge will make five retries, using a backoff algorithm, at the following intervals (in milliseconds): 200, 400, 800, 1600, 3200.

Mitigating Stuck-Job Problems
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Occasionally, a scheduled job fails, but continues running for hours or even days, until someone intervenes and cancels it. If left alone, such a “stuck”, “orphaned,” or “zombie” job will never complete. This can cause missing events in downstream receivers, along with HTTP timeout or similar errors in Cribl Edge’s logs.

To keep stuck jobs from running excessively long:

  • First, try setting Advanced > Request Timeout (secs) – whose default of 0 means “wait forever” – to a desired maximum duration.
  • If adjusting Timeout (secs) does not fix the problem, try setting Advanced > Job Timeout – whose default of 0 allows a job to run indefinitely – to a desired maximum duration.

Using these settings in tandem works like this:

  • Timeout (secs) limits the time that Cribl Edge will wait for an HTTP request to complete.
  • Then, if a job gets stuck and keeps running beyond that limit, Job Timeout can catch and terminate the job, because it monitors the overall time the job has been running.