Source types available

You might want to get a wide look at all the source types available when doing the following:

• Creating a timebound picture of network activity

Prerequisites 

In order to execute this procedure in your environment, you may need to first on-board the data, services, or apps shown in the following table.

Example

The purpose of this example is to show how this procedure works in a general environment. In your environment, you can optimize the search by specifying an index, a time range, or a different data source. 

Your Splunk deployment has hundreds of data sources (sourcetype) stretching over days, weeks, months or years. You need to know which ones are relevant to a certain investigation.

1. Set the search time range to the time relevant to the investigation, if known.
2. Run the following search: 

| metadata type=sourcetypes 
| sort - totalCount

Search Explanation

The table provides an explanation of what each part of this search achieves. You can adjust this query based on the specifics of your environment.

Result

The result shows all the source types available to you. The source type you focus on depends on the nature of the investigation. For example, if you're hunting in PowerShell, you probably want to focus on host-based data sources like Microsoft event logs and Microsoft Sysmon. You might later also look at network data sources, but host-based sources are a good start.