Splunk Search

What is the difference between a "Finalized" search and a "Done" search?

woodcock
Esteemed Legend

After upgrading to v8.0.1 we noticed that many of our long-running scheduled searches are ending up in a "Finalized" state, instead of a "Done" state. We also suspect that our results are now incomplete. What is happening?

0 Karma
1 Solution

woodcock
Esteemed Legend

New in 8.* (maybe in later v7 releases, too) is the workload management feature:
https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/8.0.1/Workloads/Keyconcepts

I suspect that we have been assigned (possibly by default) greater constraints on our searches than we had before the upgrade and this is crippling our long-running searches.

We looked at a search that should be writing 100K rows to a lookup and found that now we see in the results are only 325 rows. Further inspection of the search.log yields this critical tidbit:

• info : Search auto-finalized after disk usage limit (400MB) reached.
• info : Search finalized.

So we need to do several things to fix this.

First, change the way that we work: for any search of substantial size, be sure to check the job inspector before trusting the results. If you are unsure or need to look back in time, you can go to “Activity” -> “Jobs” and look for any search that says Finalized instead of Done. Good searches show Done; compromised/bad searches show Finalized” From now on, we must be diligent to watch for and NEVER use/trust any Finalized search, because it ABSOLUTELY has partial results.

Second, we must no longer allow ANY scheduled searches to be run by any regular user. As soon as it is “good to go”, we need to let the Splunk admin know so that he can move the ownership to nobody or a system account so that they run with more liberal constraints.

View solution in original post

woodcock
Esteemed Legend

New in 8.* (maybe in later v7 releases, too) is the workload management feature:
https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/8.0.1/Workloads/Keyconcepts

I suspect that we have been assigned (possibly by default) greater constraints on our searches than we had before the upgrade and this is crippling our long-running searches.

We looked at a search that should be writing 100K rows to a lookup and found that now we see in the results are only 325 rows. Further inspection of the search.log yields this critical tidbit:

• info : Search auto-finalized after disk usage limit (400MB) reached.
• info : Search finalized.

So we need to do several things to fix this.

First, change the way that we work: for any search of substantial size, be sure to check the job inspector before trusting the results. If you are unsure or need to look back in time, you can go to “Activity” -> “Jobs” and look for any search that says Finalized instead of Done. Good searches show Done; compromised/bad searches show Finalized” From now on, we must be diligent to watch for and NEVER use/trust any Finalized search, because it ABSOLUTELY has partial results.

Second, we must no longer allow ANY scheduled searches to be run by any regular user. As soon as it is “good to go”, we need to let the Splunk admin know so that he can move the ownership to nobody or a system account so that they run with more liberal constraints.

randy_moore
Path Finder

Ouch. That definitely puts a crimp in our upgrade plans. We allow regular users to have liberal constraints now and create/run/modify scheduled searches in their apps. Adding constraints to them or moving so they couldn't update them adds some additional operational processes that have not been accounted for.

Thanks @woodcock

woodcock
Esteemed Legend

This should not be a problem. Just be sure to check out the feature's defaults BEFORE you upgrade and make sure that you set them appropriately.

0 Karma
Get Updates on the Splunk Community!

Index This | I am a number, but when you add ‘G’ to me, I go away. What number am I?

March 2024 Edition Hayyy Splunk Education Enthusiasts and the Eternally Curious!  We’re back with another ...

What’s New in Splunk App for PCI Compliance 5.3.1?

The Splunk App for PCI Compliance allows customers to extend the power of their existing Splunk solution with ...

Extending Observability Content to Splunk Cloud

Register to join us !   In this Extending Observability Content to Splunk Cloud Tech Talk, you'll see how to ...