Machines are trying to tell us something through logs, so they are a very valuable resource for IT departments to ensure that everything is working as expected and to give us an idea of what is going on in our ITenvironments which will help to respond faster to incidents.

In this hands-on course, we will learn how to set up a small virtual LAB to simulate real-world logging and monitoring scenarios, where we will collect logs from Apache web server and Fortigate firewall and send them to Splunk for storage, analysis, visualization and alerting.

Iselected these two log sources specifically because they represent the majority of log sources you will find in your environment, so you can follow the same steps in the course to integrate different log sources in the future.

There are more complex log sources to integrate like logs that are pulled from database but they are not suitable to be discussed in an introductory course.

After we onboard logs to Splunk, we will search and explore data we received then we will add knowledge to it by extracting interesting fields in these logs.

At this point, our logs will be ready to be treated by Splunk Searching Processing Language (SPL) to create reports, dashboards, and alerts.

This course will make you ready to dig deep into more advanced topics of Splunk administration like,

• High availability

• Indexers clusters

• Search head clusters

• Deployments servers

• Splunk Apps

• Advanced SPL

But you have to walk before you run, so my vision for this course is to master the basics first to break the ice.