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Every week people ask me to show them how to use Splunk to stitch together multiple events that might exist in different locations within different sources because, from an IT perspective, they are considered to be part of larger transaction groups. They tell me they want to know how to do this because the ability to trend against transitively-related events becomes very powerful in helping them understand the reality of IT operations and how efficiencies can be increased and costs can be more quickly and significantly reduced.

I thought I would share a quick example of how to do this using the transaction command.

Let’s start with a couple sample user activity log files containing some events that are related by multiple keys. Take a moment to study the two following sample activity log files and notice how the user and session key values are related between the files.