SPLK-1001 Basic Searching and Transforming Commands Practice Question
A large e-commerce company uses Splunk to monitor their web application. The operations team has noticed that the search for tracking user sessions is taking too long and consuming excessive resources. The current search is:
index=web sourcetype=access_combined | stats count by clientip, sessionid, productid | sort - count
The index contains over 10 billion events per day. The team wants to reduce the search time while still being able to identify the top 10 most active sessions (combinations of clientip and sessionid) that involve more than 5 product views. They also need to exclude any sessions that originated from internal IPs (10.0.0.0/8). Which approach would achieve this most efficiently?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often choose Option C because they think filtering after `stats` is acceptable, but they miss that early filtering in the base search is critical for performance, and they also overlook the requirement to exclude sessions with 5 or fewer product views.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Add 'clientip!=10.0.0.0/8' in the base search, then use 'stats count by clientip, sessionid', then 'where count>5', then 'sort - count | head 10'.
It filters out internal IPs early in the base search using `clientip!=10.0.0.0/8`, which reduces the dataset before any transformation. It then uses `stats count by clientip, sessionid` to aggregate sessions, applies `where count>5` to enforce the minimum product views, and finally sorts and limits to the top 10. This approach minimizes resource consumption by pushing filtering as early as possible and avoids unnecessary fields like `productid`.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Use 'eventstats count by clientip, sessionid' and then filter where count > 5, then sort and head.
Why it's wrong here
eventstats does not reduce events, still processes all.
- ✗
Use the 'transaction' command to group events by clientip and sessionid, then filter by duration.
Why it's wrong here
Transaction is more resource-intensive than stats.
- ✗
Add a 'where' command after stats to filter out internal IPs and use 'head 10' at the end.
Why it's wrong here
Internal IPs are not filtered early, still processes all data.
- ✓
Add 'clientip!=10.0.0.0/8' in the base search, then use 'stats count by clientip, sessionid', then 'where count>5', then 'sort - count | head 10'.
Why this is correct
Filters early, uses efficient stats, then filters and sorts on reduced data.
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
This SPLK-1001 question is part of Courseiva's 502-question bank — original exam-style content with full explanations and wrong-answer analysis, never real exam questions or exam dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This SPLK-1001 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Splunk certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the SPLK-1001 exam.