Splunk 7.x Quick Start Guide

Metrics indexes

The indexes we have discussed so far are created to contain standard events that can accommodate a wide variety of log or device data formats and include any number of fields. With the release of Splunk Enterprise 7.x, Splunk introduced "metrics" indexes, which, as the name suggests, are used to store numerical values that pertain to any activity or process measured over an interval of time—metrics from applications, servers, network devices, IoT sensors, and so on. Splunk natively supports metrics from some well-known industry metrics-gathering tools, as well as the use of the HTTP Event Collector for collecting metrics:

• collectd agent: A Unix-based daemon, using the write_HTTP plugin
• StatsD line protocol: This is used by ...