Category Archives: API

Retrieving data from Splunk Dashboard Panels via API

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Retrieving data from Splunk Dashboard Panels via API. Fist of all, why might someone want to get data from the panels of a dashboard in Splunk? Why it might be useful? Well, if the script can process everything that human analyst sees on a Splunk dashboard, all the automation comes very natural. You just figure out what routine operations the analyst usually does using the dashboard and repeat his actions in the script as is. It may be the anomaly detection, remediation task creation, reaction on various events, whatever. It really opens endless possibilities without alerts, reports and all this stuff. I’m very excited about this. 🙂

Exporting data from Splunk dashboard

Let’s say we have a Splunk dashboard and want to get data from the table panel using a python script. The problem is that the content of the table that we see is not actually stored anywhere. In fact it is the results of some search query, from the XML representation of the dashboard, executed by Splunk web GUI. To get this data we should execute the same search request.

That’s why we should:

  1. Get XML code of the dashboard
  2. Get the search query for each panel
  3. Process searches based on other searches and get complete search query for each panel
  4. Launch the search request and get the results

First of all, we need to create a special account that will be used for getting data from Splunk. In Web GUI “Access controls -> Users”.

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Creating Splunk Alerts using API

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Creating Splunk Alerts using API. As I mentioned in “Accelerating Splunk Dashboards with Base Searches and Saved Searches“, Splunk Reports are basically the Saved Searches. Moreover, Splunk Alerts are also the same Saved Searches with some additional parameters.

Creating Splunk Alerts using API

The question is what parameters you need to set to get the right Alert.

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Managing JIRA Scrum Sprints using API

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Managing JIRA Scrum Sprints using API. Atlassian Jira is a great tool for organizing Agile processes, especially Scrum. But managing Scrum Sprints manually using Jira web GUI maybe time consuming and annoying. So, I decided to automate some routine operations using JIRA API and Python.

The API calls are described on the official page at JIRA Agile REST API Reference.

Managing JIRA Agile Sprints using API

I will use my domain account for authentication. First of all let’s see how to get Jira Scrum Board ID by it’s name and get all the Sprints related to the Board.

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Accelerating Splunk Dashboards with Base Searches and Saved Searches

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Accelerating Splunk Dashboards with Base Searches and Saved Searches. Let’s say we have a Splunk dashboard with multiple panels. Each panel has its own search request and all of these requests work independently and simultaneously. If they are complex enough, rendering the dashboard may take quite a long time and some panels may even fall by timeout.

Accelerating Splunk Dashboards

How to avoid this? The first step is to understand how the searches are related. May be it is possible to select some base searches, and reuse their results in other child-searches. It’s also possible to get cached results from the “Saved Searches” (another name of Reports in Splunk GUI).

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How to create and manage Splunk dashboards via API

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How to create and manage Splunk dashboards via API. In the previous post “How to correlate different events in Splunk and make dashboards” I mentioned that Splunk dashboards can be presented in a simple XML form. You can generate it with some script and then copy-past it in Splunk GUI.

Splunk dashboard manage api

However, this manual operations can make the process of debugging dashboards really annoying. It would be much easier to send dashboard XML content to Splunk using Splunk API. And it is actually possible. 🙂

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Retrieving IT Asset lists from NetBox via API

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Retrieving IT Asset lists from NetBox via API. A little bit more about IT Asset Inventory of Internal Network, that your IT team can provide. 😉

I have recently worked with NetBox – an open source IP address management (IPAM) and data center infrastructure management (DCIM) solution developed by well-known cloud hosting provider DigitalOcean.

NetBox api

It’s not really about security, not even a CMDB. But, security team still might be interested in NetBox, because it makes possible to track the hosts in some critical subnet without active scanning, providing great visibility of assets. Here I will show a small example of NetBox API usage.

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Asset Inventory for Internal Network: problems with Active Scanning and advantages of Splunk

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Asset Inventory for Internal Network: problems with Active Scanning and advantages of Splunk. In the previous post, I was writing about Asset Inventory and Vulnerability Scanning on the Network Perimeter. Now it’s time to write about the Internal Network.

Typical IT-infrastructure of a large organization

I see a typical IT-infrastructure of a large organization as monstrous favela, like Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong. At the beginning it was probably wisely designed, but for years it  was highly effected by spontaneous development processes in various projects as well as multiple acquisitions. And now very few people in the organization really understand how it all works and who owns each peace.

There is a common belief that we can use Active Network Scanning for Asset Inventory in the organization. Currently, I’m not a big fan of this approach, and I will try to explain here the disadvantages of this method and mention some alternatives.

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