Why?
You might be asking “Why should I use revision control with Splunk – I’m not developing code or anything!” The thing is, with Splunk you are developing code, it’s just that Splunk does a great job of hiding that fact from you! For example, when you add/update a saved search or dashboard, Splunk is adding/updating a text file on the server with that information. This means that we can track those changes and (gasp) document those changes as we make them!
Here are just a few of the advantages to doing things this way:
- Makes it simple to track what you did, when you did it and why you did it.
- Instills some discipline in your Splunk development.
- Gives you the ability (combined with a ticketing system) to associate changes to requests.
- Makes it easier to be experimental via features like branching. Want to see if a revamp somewhere works better? Go ahead – it’s easy to roll back to a known good configuration while retaining all your experiments! Continue reading