Splunk Search

Private Geolocation searching: only sending latitude and longitude?

jluste
Path Finder

I have a desire to do geo-locating off IP addresses but due to privacy restrictions here, we can only send out of our firewall latitude and longitude, not report the IP address. Quantity shouldn't matter, but we are talking about reporting on anywhere from 100-1,000,000 IPs.

1) Do the provided apps convert the IP into lat & long locally or report the IP out to either Google or Maxmind?
2) If the IPs are reported to these companies or exit the building so to speak, can this be done locally with, say, the IP range and lat/long database, and pass that through to get a mapped representation?

0 Karma
1 Solution

Ayn
Legend

The Maxmind app does not send anything out (if it did searches would probably be horribly slow), it uses a local database that it checks IP's against and returns a long/lat based on that.

View solution in original post

TopCoder
Engager

I agree use the Maxmind database and download it locally, then you wont have to send anything out. That's what we do on our website. It's not 100% accurate, but it's in the 80% range, but their is nothing that is 100% or even close to that. So any statistics you draw from it you have to adjust to get a more accurate model with a statistical lower % of error

TopCoder
Engager

Actually, I download the updated database when they come out and replace the entire database with the new data. We use it as a lookup table, just query against it. I posted a link to show you how we use it, but apparently it was removed. 😞

0 Karma

jluste
Path Finder

Are you saying you download / update the database directly? If that is the case, do you just ingest it as a source or use it as a lookup table in the Search app? Or are you saying you downloaded the Maxmind script app?

0 Karma

jluste
Path Finder

I only have IP information, I do not have lat/long information. So, if I so a
search foo=bar ip=* | geoip ip
I'll get a mapped representation. My ask is if to get this result, the ip values are being passed outside of the splunk install on my local computer?

0 Karma

Ayn
Legend

The Maxmind app does not send anything out (if it did searches would probably be horribly slow), it uses a local database that it checks IP's against and returns a long/lat based on that.

sdaniels
Splunk Employee
Splunk Employee

I might be missing exactly what you want to do but with the google maps app you can specify lat/long and get a mapped representation. You don't need to have the IPs. You can use the _geo field like this if you have those fields in splunk already:

... | eval _geo = latitude+","+longitude

0 Karma
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