Splunk is a software tool for searching, monitoring and analysing machine generated data via web interface. It indexes and correlates real-time and non-real-time big data to generate meaningful statistics and visualisations. It is used for application management, security and compliance as well as business analytics.
Splunk reads textual data through various methods to perform its indexing. Splunk can read and index any form of textual data. Splunk reads data and divides the data into events based on the timestamps on the data. If the real time data does not contain timestamp, Splunk puts the timestamp when the data is read or puts a timestamp of the data saved in the file. Splunk however cannot read binary data. In case of binary data, user needs to input a way to convert the binary data to textual information. This can be done by
running scripts along with splunk to convert the binary data.