The Power of Splunk Search
At the core of the Splunk platform is SPL™, Splunk’s Search Processing Language. SPL is a language with immense capability that’s easy to learn. It gives you the power to ask
ANY question of ANY machine data.
The Splunk platform transforms massive amounts of machine-generated data into time-series events that can be used to answer business and operational questions in real time.
How can I correlate events across my infrastructure for service level visibility?
How can I understand usage patterns and geographical trends?
How can I monitor system performance, security and compliance issues?
What Makes Machine Data Different?
- It contains massive amounts of unstructured time-series data with no predefined schema
- It is generated by all technology systems—from applications and servers, to networks and sensors
- It is data that is unpredictable and has infinite possible formats
Why SPL?
Splunk’s SPL combines the best capabilities of SQL with the Unix pipeline syntax allowing you to:
- Access all data in its original format
- Optimize for time-series events
- Use the same language for visualizations
More Than a Search Language
SPL provides over 140 commands that allow you to search, correlate, analyze and visualize any data—an incredibly powerful language that can be summarized in five key areas.
Find the Needle in the Haystack
Search for keywords and filter through any data set. Feed search results into sub-searches to ask even more complex questions. Take a Look
Enrich and Explore
Use the “lookup” command to merge unstructured and structured data. Use data exploration commands such as “cluster” and “analyzefields” to find predictors of fields and relationships between data sets. Take a Look
Visualize Geographic Data in Real Time
Use the "iplocation" command to assign IP addresses a latitude and longitude and “geostats” to map statistics in real time. Take a Look
Predict, Chart and Visualize Statistics
Use the powerful “stats” command with over 20 different options to calculate statistics and generate trends. Then chart and visualize those results and statistics over any time range and granularity. Take a Look
Machine Learning and Anomaly Detection
Use anomaly detection to uncover unusual activities and events. Build and apply machine learning models with commands like “fit” and “apply.” Take a Look
Splunk’s search processing language (SPL) helps you rapidly explore massive amounts of machine data to find the needle in the haystack and discover the root cause of incidents. IT operations that used to take days or months can now be accomplished in a matter of hours. Once you learn how powerful SPL is, you will wonder how you ever managed without it.

Become an SPL Expert
- Documentation
- Exploring Splunk
- Search Tutorial
- Splunk Community Resources

Discover the Power of SPL
Did you know that SPL does way more than just search? Join this technical webinar where we’ll showcase techniques that can help you uncover new use cases.
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