northben's blog

I'm a big fan of Homebrew, the package manager for MacOS. There's only one problem -- I need to keep one cask (AKA a GUI application) at a specified version because I haven't paid for the latest version.

I keep coming across the Urbit project, and decided to investigate it for myself to learn what it's all about. I've read a bit and watched some youtube introduction videos, and decided I'm quite bearish on the project. I don't think it has a good future. Here's why.

I don't work at Splunk anymore, but I still do some freelance consulting, and so I thought I would share one of my old side projects, Trunk.

I am providing a couple of Github repos so that you can create and run your own Splunk instance with Trunk preconfigured to index Trello webhooks in your own AWS account. When the container starts, it subscribes to open Trello boards that are accessible with the Trello credential you provide.

The Trunk app, which provides status report dashboards.

I needed to list the lookup tables and their sizes using Splunk Web. Here's a query to do just that!

| rest splunk_server=local /services/data/lookup-table-files/
| rename eai:acl.app as app 
| table app title 
| search NOT title IN (*.kmz) 
| map maxsearches=990 search="| inputlookup $title$ 
| eval size=0
| foreach * [ eval size=size+coalesce(len('<<FIELD>>'),0), app=\"$app$\", title=$title$ | fields app title size]" 
| stats sum(size) by app title
| sort - sum(size)

The Splunk foreach SPL command is pretty useful for building powerful queries. Here are some examples that I've created as a reference for how to use this powerful command.

I've been a Trello user and fan for a long time. The intuitive interface provides a powerful platform for managing any project in a Kanban or Scrum methodology.

Suppose that you have a Splunk query that returns a result set with some duplicate fields. Would you like to remove the duplicate fields so that you can quickly identify the differenes between each result? Here's a macro to do it!

If you have a Splunk query that returns empty fields, you can use this query to programatically remove these blanks.

As I've worked on many large-scale Splunk environments, a common problem I've noticed is that Splunk forwarders phone home to the deployment server (DS) too frequently. When a forwarder phones home to the DS more often than necessary, it wastes resources on the DS, and can prevent the DS from deploying apps to forwarders correctly.

If you are Splunk admin, consultant, or power user, you may find yourself referring to the docs frequently. I bookmarked the Splunk docs that I frequently use, and I am sharing these bookmarks for everyone to use.

To add these bookmarks to Chrome, open the bookmark manager and then click import bookmarks.

To add these bookmarks to Firefox, open the bookmark manager and then click import bookmarks from HTML.