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Splunk SPL · SOC Analyst How do you optimise a slow Splunk search?
Optimisation hierarchy: (1) Filter early — most-restrictive index/sourcetype/host first. Splunk performs left-to-right filtering. (2) Use earliest/latest as tight as possible. (3) Avoid wildcards at start of search terms. (4) Use stats over transaction (faster). (5) Use tstats on accelerated data models when possible. (6) Use map-reduce parallelism — index-time fields beat extract-at-search-time. (7) Avoid join — use stats-based correlation instead. Example transformation: 'index=* error' → 'index=app sourcetype=app:error error' is 100× faster.
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Related Splunk SPL questions
Splunk SPL
Q. Write a Splunk SPL query to detect brute-force authentication attempts.
index=auth sourcetype=*ssh* OR sourcetype=*windows* action=failure | bucket _time span=5m | stats count by src_ip, _time | where count > 10 | sort -count
Key concepts: bucket _time aggregates events into 5-minute window…
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