SPLK-3002 Splunk IT Service Intelligence Certified Admin Exam Questions and Answers

In Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI), notable events are created and managed within the context of its Event Analytics framework. These notable events are stored in theitsi_tracked_alertsindex. This index is specifically designed to hold the active notable events that are generated by ITSI's correlation searches, which are based on the conditions defined for various services and their KPIs. Notable events are essentially alerts or issues that need to be investigated and resolved. Theitsi_tracked_alertsindex enables efficient storage, querying, and management of these events, facilitating the ITSI's event management and review process. The other options, such asitsi_notable_archiveanditsi_notable_audit, serve different purposes, such as archiving resolved notable events and auditing changes to notable event configurations, respectively. Therefore, the correct answer for where active notable events are stored is theitsi_tracked_alertsindex.

In the context of troubleshooting KPI search performance in Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI), the search names in the job activity that identify base searches typically follow the pattern "Indicator - Shared - xxxx - ITSI Search." These base searches are fundamental components of the KPI calculation process, aggregating and preparing data for further analysis by KPIs. Identifying these base searches in the job activity is crucial for diagnosing performance issues, as these searches can be resource-intensive and impact overall system performance. Understanding the naming convention helps administrators and analysts quickly pinpoint the base searches related to specific KPIs, facilitating more effective troubleshooting and optimization of search performance within the ITSI environment.

To utilize Adaptive Thresholding in Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI), the minimum requirement for a set of Key Performance Indicator (KPI) data is that it must be at least 7 days old. Adaptive Thresholding uses historical data to dynamically adjust thresholds based on observed patterns and trends. Having a minimum of 7 days worth of data allows the system to analyze a sufficient amount of information to identify normal ranges and variances in KPI behavior, thereby setting more accurate and contextually relevant thresholds. This requirement ensures that the adaptive thresholds are based on a meaningful data set that reflects the typical operational conditions of the monitored services.

ITSI Saved Search Scheduling is a feature that allows you to schedule searches that run periodically to populate the data for your KPIs. You can configure various settings for your scheduled searches, such as the search frequency, the time range, the cron expression, and so on. One of the settings is realtime_schedule, which controls the way the scheduler computes the next execution time of a scheduled search. The statement that is accurate about this configuration is:

B. If this value is set to 0, the scheduler bases its determination of the next scheduled search on the last search execution time. This is called continuous scheduling. If set to 0, the scheduler never skips scheduled execution periods. However, the execution of the saved search might fall behind depending on the scheduler’s load. Use continuous scheduling whenever you enable the summary index option.

The other statements are not accurate because:

A. If this value is set to 0, the scheduler bases its determination of the next scheduled search execution time on the current time. This is not true because this is what happens when the value is set to 1, not 0.

C. If this value is set to 0, the scheduler may skip scheduled execution periods. This is not true because this is what happens when the value is set to 1, not 0.

D. If this value is set to 0, the scheduler might skip some execution periods to make sure that the scheduler is executing the searches running over the most recent time range. This is not true because this is what happens when the value is set to 1, not 0.

Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI) is designed to align IT monitoring with the business outcomes that matter to stakeholders — especially executives who are focused on service performance and its impact on revenue, customer experience, and operational goals. In ITSI,entitiesrepresent the individual components that make up services and contribute to Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Selecting the right entities for service modeling is critical: technical entities (like hosts or network interfaces) are useful for IT operations troubleshooting, but they don’t inherently represent business outcomes. Executive leadership cares about how incidents affect business capabilities and outcomes — such as sales performance, customer transactions, and channel health. Therefore, entities that reflectbusiness context(for example, store locations, product categories, or payment types) map IT issues directly to business performance indicators. When executives can see service health and incidents broken down by these business‑centric entities, they gainimpactful visibilityinto how issues affect revenue, customer interactions, and overall business operations. In contrast, purely technical entities such as hosts or network interfaces do not provide that business impact perspective, and demographic slices like season or customer age — while potentially valuable for marketing — don’t directly connect IT service health to business service performance in ITSI modeling.

In Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI), the Service Analyzer visually represents service dependencies. Asolidline between services indicates a normal one‑way dependency where one service’s health contributes to another’s service health score. However, adottedline signifies acyclic dependency, meaning that two services are defined as depending on each other in a loop. This typically happens when a service is configured to depend on another service that, directly or indirectly, also depends back on the first service. In Helga’s scenario, because the web service is set to depend on the database using the Heartbeat KPI, and the configuration somehow established a reverse dependency (even inadvertently), the Service Analyzer shows the relationship as cyclic with a dotted line. To resolve this, Helga needs to check the service dependency configuration for the database service and ensure it doesnotmistakenly include the web service (or any chain of dependencies that leads back to it). Removing or correcting that erroneous dependency breaks the cycle, which will then change the representation to a solid line and properly reflect the dependency without circular references. It’s not related to KPI importance values in this context — importance affects health score calculation but does not cause a cyclic dependency indicator.

After you configure KPI thresholds, you can set up alerts to notify you when aggregate KPI severities change. ITSI generates notable events in Episode Review based on the alerting rules you configure.

Anomaly detection generates notable events when a KPI IT Service Intelligence (ITSI) deviates from an expected pattern.

Notable events are typically generated by a correlation search.

In Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI), notable event groups are used to logically group related notable events, which enhances the manageability and analysis of events:

A.Notable event groups combine independent notable events:This characteristic allows for the aggregation of related events into a single group, making it easier for users to manage and investigate related issues. By grouping events, users can focus on the broader context of an issue rather than getting lost in the details of individual events.

While notable event groups play a critical role in organizing and managing events in ITSI, they do not inherently allow users to adjust threshold settings, which is typically handled at the KPI or service level. Additionally, while notable event groups are utilized within the ITSI framework, the statement that they are created in the 'itsi_tracked_alerts' index might not fully capture the complexity of how event groups are managed and stored within the ITSI architecture.

In Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI), entities represent infrastructure components, applications, or other elements that are monitored. Each entity is uniquely identified by its entity ID, and entities can be associated with one or more services through the concept of aliases. A problem arises when two or more entities have the same value in a single alias field because aliases are used to match events to entities in ITSI. If multiple entities share the same alias value, ITSI might incorrectly associate data with the wrong entity, leading to inaccurate monitoring and analytics. This scenario requires correction to ensure that each alias uniquely identifies a single entity, thereby maintaining the integrity of the monitoring and analysis process within ITSI. The uniqueness of service IDs, entity IDs, and entity key values in info fields is also important but does not typically present the same level of issue as duplicate values in an alias field.

D is the correct answer because teams allow you to restrict access to service content in UI views such as service analyzers, glass tables, deep dives, and episode review. Teams also control access to services and KPIs for editing and viewing purposes. Teams do not affect the ability to search against the itsi_summary index, restrict notable event alert actions, or restrict searches against the itsi_notable_audit index. References: Overview of teams in ITSI

Service templates in Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI) are designed to streamline the creation of services by providing pre-defined configurations:

B.Service templates contain KPIs and KPI thresholds:This allows for the standardized deployment of services with predefined performance indicators and their associated thresholds, ensuring consistency across similar services.

C.Service templates can contain specific or generic entity rules:These rules define how entities are associated with services created from the template, allowing for both broad and targeted applicability.

While service templates contain configurations for KPIs, thresholds, and entity rules, the ability to modify templates after services have been instantiated from them is limited. Changes to a template do not retroactively affect services already created from that template. Moreover, service templates do not inherently contain domain-specific dashboards or deep dives; these are created separately within ITSI.

In Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI), administrators can manually control the grouping of notable events using aggregation policies. Aggregation policies allow for the definition of criteria based on which notable events are grouped together. This includes configuring rules based on event fields, severity, source, or other event attributes. Through these policies, administrators can tailor the event grouping logic to meet the specific needs of their environment, ensuring that related events are grouped in a manner that facilitates efficient analysis and response. This feature is crucial for managing the volume of events and focusing on the most critical issues by effectively organizing related events into manageable groups.

Search results are processed, created, and written to the itsi_summary index via an alert action. 

In Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI), when using multiple event management policies, it is important to understand that policy processing is applied in a defined order. This order is crucial because it determines how events are processed and aggregated, and which rules are applied to events first. The order of policies can be customized, allowing administrators to prioritize certain policies over others based on the specific needs and operational logic of their IT environment. This feature provides flexibility in event management, enabling more precise control over event processing and ensuring that the most critical events are handled according to the desired precedence. This structured approach to policy processing helps in maintaining the efficiency and effectiveness of event management within ITSI.

Splunk ITSI offers two built‑in anomaly detection algorithms:TrendingandEntity Cohesion. TheTrendingalgorithm works on theaggregate KPI series, comparing recent KPI behavior with its historical pattern to detect unusual trending patterns over time. It doesnotevaluate behavior across separate entities within the KPI split — it simply looks at deviations from historical trends in the combined KPI values. On the other hand, theEntity Cohesionalgorithm is specifically designed to detect when entities that are expected to behave similarly begin to diverge in behavior. When a KPI is split by entity (for example, multiple servers, locations, or service tiers), Entity Cohesion normalizes each entity’s time series and compares them against each other. If one entity’s pattern differs significantly from the group’s patterns, it is flagged as an anomaly. This matches the “paired monitoring requirement” of producing an alert whenone entity in the KPI is not behaving similarly to the other entities. The option describing entity cohesion paired with that requirement reflects the correct use case for this algorithm in ITSI. Neither trending anomaly detection nor entity cohesion anomaly detection is intended to detect multiple KPIs deviating at the service level — such cross‑KPI alerts are handled by other alerting constructs like multi‑KPI alerts or correlation searches, not these specific anomaly algorithms.

It's a best practice to schedule maintenance windows with a 15- to 30-minute time buffer before and after you start and stop your maintenance work. This gives the system an opportunity to catch up with the maintenance state and reduces the chances of ITSI generating false positives during maintenance operations.

A is the correct answer because anomaly detection can be enabled on a KPI level in ITSI. Anomaly detection allows you to identify trends and outliers in KPI search results that might indicate an issue with your system. You can enable anomaly detection for a KPI by selecting one of the two anomaly detection algorithms in the KPI configuration panel. References: Apply anomaly detection to a KPI in ITSI

When creating a custom deep dive, services or KPIs that are in maintenance mode are shown in gray color in the topology view. This indicates that they are not actively monitored and do not generate alerts or notable events. References: Deep Dives

When planning and designing a service tree in Splunk ITSI, the focus is onunderstanding how services, components, and dependencies relate to each otherso that ITSI can model service health, impact, and business relevance accurately. A technical diagram of the application and its interconnections provides direct insight into thecomponents and dependency relationshipsthat must be included in the service tree. A report of historical incidents and associated root causes offers valuable context for definingwhich components are critical, where failures have occurred, and how issues propagate, making it highly relevant to service modeling. A service topology from an IT Service Management (ITSM) tool also directly informs the modeling process by showingconfigured relationships between infrastructure and services, which can be imported or referenced to build accurate service trees. In contrast, anorganizational chart of the companyshows the reporting relationships and team structure within the organization — useful for human resource planning or escalation paths, but not directly useful for service tree design in ITSI. Organizational charts do not provide information about application components, their runtime connections, or how failures affect service delivery, making them theleast usefulmaterial when designing a service tree for technical and service health purposes. Therefore, company org charts are generally not relevant to ITSI service modeling.

In the context of Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI), service dependencies allow for the modeling of relationships between services, where the health of one service (dependent) can affect the health of another (primary).

B.It is best practice to use the dependent service's built-in 'ServiceHealthScore' KPI to reflect impact to the primary service:Utilizing the 'ServiceHealthScore' KPI of a dependent service as part of the primary service's health calculation is a recommended practice. This approach ensures that changes in the health of the dependent service directly influence the primary service's overall health score, providing a more holistic view of service health within the IT environment.

C.Setting the dependent service KPI importance level will be treated as any other KPI in the primary service's health score:When a dependent service's KPI is incorporated into a primary service, the importance level assigned to this KPI is factored into the primary service's overall health score calculation just like any other KPI. This means that the impact of the dependent service on the primary service can be weighted according to the business significance of the relationship between the services.

The other options are not accurate representations of ITSI service dependencies. Changes in KPI importance levels do not break dependencies, and there is no restriction on configuring impactful dependent services to only one primary service, as dependencies can be complex and multi-layered across various services.