Improving Your Splunk Skills

Using a lookup with wildcards

Splunk lookups also support wildcards, which we can use in this case.

One advantage is that we can define arbitrary fields for grouping, independent of the values of url.

For a lookup wildcard to work, first we need to set up our url field and the lookup:

1. Extract the url field. The rex pattern we used before should work:

s[AZ]+s(?P<url>.*?)s. See Chapter 3, Tables, Charts, and Fields, for detailed instructions on setting up a field extraction. Don't forget to set permissions on the extraction.

2. Create our lookup file. Let's call the lookup file flatten_summary_lookup.csv. Use the following contents for our example log:

url,section 
/about/*,about 
/contact/*,contact 
/*/*,unknown_non_root 
/*,root 
*,nomatch