As the number of events retrieved by a query increases, the performance decreases linearly. Summary indexing allows you to calculate the statistics in advance and then run reports against these roll ups, dramatically increasing performance.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
- Understanding summary indexes
- When to use a summary index
- When not to use a summary index
- Populating summary indexes with saved searches
- Using summary index events in a query
- Using sistats, sitop, and sitimechart
- How latency affects summary queries
- How and when to backfill summary data
- Reducing summary index size
- Calculating top for a large time frame
- Using CSV files to store transient data
- Speeding up queries and backfilling
