Thanks! Let me try to understand what you said. * About services. I agree for something this simple, 1 service with multiple KPIs should suffice. I proposed multiple services because of some other reasons. One of them is silo-ed departments. The OS team or WEB team is completely separate from each other. They demand clear delineation of "their stuff". In your experience, when would you go with multiple services with dependencies between them? * Let's go with 1 service for a simplified case. I remember being taught the natural business key of an entity is the combinations of title+alias+information. That's why it is Theoretically possible to have 2 entities with the same title. See this: https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/ITSI/4.5.0/Entity/EntityImportConflicts for an example that can lead to 2 entities with the same title, e.g 2 servers with the same host name on different data centers. My question is when you would go with treating potential entities from different sources as being essential one entity and when you will separate them? * Let me apply your strategy of unifying entities that applies to my case, please correct me if I'm wrong: I created previously at least 1 entity per forwarder instance with Title-><hostname>, instead in my entity importing search, I should add a tmpentity field--- eval tmpentity=hostname and make tmpentity the Title, and also include tmpentity as part of the alias fields. For importing entities from any other data sources, if I decide that they should be just referring to and enriching an existing entity, instead of creating a different entity, I would: eval tmpentity=<a field that takes the same set of values as existing entity>, and use tmpentity will be used as the conflict resolution field so for the web log, tmpentity=host will suffice. what about the OS log, where entity is called "web-host" in the "host" field. should I do eval tmpentity=if(host="web-host", "web01", host)? In my service definition / entity associations, I will then always use tmpentity field for filtering. I should also then always include "eval tmpentity=..." in my base KPI searches. I appreciate any comments.
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