MLTK deep dives overview

The Splunk Machine Learning Toolkit (MLTK) lets you create, validate, manage, and operationalize machine learning models through a guided user interface. If you're unsure where to get started with MLTK you can use this series of deep dives to get walk-throughs of implementing the machine learning (ML) search commands that ship with MLTK for specific ML goals.

You can follow each deep dive from start to finish and implement the same operational outcomes in your own Splunk platform environment. Each deep dive consists of some example data sources, sample SPL code, and instructions for implementing the analytic.

Note: You might need to tune or modify these examples to work properly on your data. SPL knowledge is valuable when trying to implement these deep dives in your own environment.

What makes ML different from other analytics in Splunk products?

Most analytics in the Splunk platform revolve around hard-to-find types of searches, where you are trying to spot a particular event or set of events that make up something of interest. For example, looking for memory errors on a server, or looking for a user running a process that is known to be malicious.

These types of analytics can usually be implemented with a single SPL search, whereas with ML you almost always need to run two searches: one to train a model, using the fit command, and one to apply a model, using the apply command.

The fit command is similar to the outputlookup command, and the apply is similar to the lookup. The apply stage is usually analogous with the hard-too-find detection search, but the training of models can seem unusual if you are new to machine learning. To learn more about how the fit and apply commands behave, see About the fit and apply commands.

Available deep dives

See also