SPLK-1001 Basic Searching and Transforming Commands Practice Question
A medium-sized company uses Splunk to monitor its e-commerce platform. The platform generates around 10 million events per day from web servers, application logs, and databases. The security team wants to identify the top 10 IP addresses that trigger the most 403 Forbidden errors in the last 24 hours. However, when they run the search: index=ecom sourcetype=web status=403 | top src_ip, the search takes over 5 minutes to complete and sometimes times out. The team needs a faster approach that still accurately identifies the top IPs. The team's Splunk environment uses indexers and a search head. The data is not accelerated. What should the team do to improve search performance?
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently think minor command changes (like using 'stats' instead of 'top' or adding 'fields') will significantly improve performance, when in reality the bottleneck is the full scan of 10 million events, which only data aggregation techniques like summary indexing or report acceleration can solve.
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
✓
Create a report acceleration summary for the search or implement summary indexing
Report acceleration or summary indexing pre-computes and stores the results of the search, allowing subsequent runs to retrieve the aggregated data almost instantly. Given the environment has indexers and a search head but no acceleration, enabling report acceleration on the search creates a summary that updates periodically, bypassing the need to scan all raw events each time. This directly addresses the timeout issue by reducing the per-search data volume to the pre-built summary.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Replace 'top' with 'rare' to reduce the amount of data processed
Why it's wrong here
Rare is even more resource-intensive than top.
- ✗
Use 'stats count by src_ip | sort - count | head 10' instead of top
Why it's wrong here
This is essentially the same operation as top, with no performance gain.
- ✗
Add 'fields src_ip' before top to remove other fields
Why it's wrong here
While fields can help, the bottleneck is the aggregation, not field width.
- ✓
Create a report acceleration summary for the search or implement summary indexing
Why this is correct
Acceleration pre-computes results, so on-demand searches are fast.
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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.