Managing Source Types Across Teams Without Losing Your Sanity

Sourcetypes are the lifeblood of a well-functioning Splunk deployment—but when multiple teams are onboarding data, things can get messy fast.

Here’s how we kept things sane when different groups were sending logs to shared infrastructure.

Rule #1: One Format, One Sourcetype

If you have three apps sending logs that look the same, use one sourcetype. If one app changes the format—give it a new sourcetype.

Avoid generic types like syslog, logfile, or json_input.

Rule #2: Prefixes for Ownership

We adopted a naming scheme like this:

teamx:appname:logtype

Example:

payments:stripe:api auth:okta:web

This gave everyone clarity and avoided ownership collisions.

Rule #3: Lock Down props.conf

Don’t let every team push their own sourcetype settings unless you trust them deeply. Centralize it or use deployment server scoping.

Real-World Burn

We once had two teams using sourcetype=syslog with totally different log formats. One team’s field extractions started breaking the other’s dashboards. It took us a week to realize the problem was a shared sourcetype.

TL;DR

• Unique sourcetypes per format
• Naming conventions reduce chaos
• Control access to shared configs