The six components at a glance

A component is the kind of thing an entity is. It determines what TrackMe measures, which thresholds apply, and what “healthy” means. Every entity belongs to exactly one component, and the six codes — DSM, DHM, MHM, FLX, FQM, WLK — appear throughout the interface, the metrics, and the REST API.

Code

Component

What it tracks

Use it to answer

DSM

Data Source Monitoring

(index, sourcetype) data feeds — delay, latency, volume, quality.

Is my data flowing?

DHM

Data Host Monitoring

Host × sourcetype activity per endpoint.

Who is sending, and what?

MHM

Metric Host Monitoring

Hosts sending metric data, by metric category.

Are my metrics arriving?

FLX

Flex Objects

Anything you can express in SPL, with custom KPIs.

Is this custom thing healthy?

FQM

Field Quality Monitoring

Field extraction quality and CIM compliance.

Is my data well-parsed?

WLK

Workload Knowledge

Scheduled-search execution health.

Are my searches healthy?

DSM, DHM, and MHM form the Splunk Feeds family and share a delay/latency model. FLX, FQM, and WLK share a dynamic-thresholds + metrics model.

The shared entity model

However different the six components look, every entity has the same shape and lifecycle.

An entity always has:

  • an object — its canonical, unique key (what it identifies differs per component);

  • an alias — an editable display name;

  • a state — 🟢 green / 🟠 orange / 🔴 red / 🔵 blue (see Entity State & Scoring);

  • a score, thresholds, anomaly fields, and a cache of its latest metrics.

And every entity goes through the same lifecycle each cycle:

DISCOVER  →  TRACK  →  EVALUATE  →  ALERT / LIFECYCLE
a tracker     each run    decision maker   stateful alerting,
enumerates    refreshes   sets state +     acknowledgment,
units and     metrics     score from       purge of inactive
creates       & times     thresholds       entities
entities

Note

Trackers are scheduled searches, usually running every five minutes. The freshness of a delay measurement is therefore only as precise as the tracker cadence — a five-minute schedule can report a delay up to five minutes after the fact. Entities can also be declared before they exist (see expected sources / hosts for DSM and DHM); a declared entity starts red until real data arrives.

Choosing a component

You want to track…

Use

The freshness and volume of an index + sourcetype feed

DSM

Which hosts are sending, and what sourcetypes, per host

DHM

Hosts sending data to a metrics index

MHM

Field parsing quality / CIM coverage

FQM

Scheduled-search execution health (skips, errors, delay, cost)

WLK

Anything else you can write a search for

FLX

What every component shares

These concerns apply to all six and are documented once, in their own parts:

  • Classification — priority, tags, labels, and SLA (Classification & Protection).

  • Protection — logical groups, the disruption queue, and acknowledgments (Classification & Protection, Alerting).

  • Stateful alerting — one state machine for all six (Alerting).

  • Scoring — one hybrid score; the per-anomaly weights differ per component (Entity State & Scoring).

  • ML outlier detection — a natural fit for DSM and FLX; less useful, and off by default, for DHM, MHM, FQM, and WLK (Machine Learning).

  • Topology graphs — every component can render its entities as an interactive link / network graph (see Topology graphs below).

Where the components differ

A few capabilities are specific to certain components. Keep this map in mind:

Capability

Available for

Variable delay & lagging classes

DSM, DHM (MHM uses static thresholds)

Data sampling, elastic sources, lookup monitoring

DSM only

Expected-sources / hosts injection & coverage-gap analysis

DSM, DHM

Dynamic, time-sliceable metric thresholds

FLX, FQM

Versioning, orphan detection, app enablement, SVC cost

WLK

Free-form KPIs, template catalog, converging trackers

FLX

Topology graphs

Every component can render its entities as an interactive topology graph — open it from the graph icon in the Tenant Home header (the icon is contextual to the component tab you are viewing). The modal offers two views, a Link graph and a Network graph, and lays the tenant’s entities out as a hierarchy:

Component

Hierarchy

DSM

tenant → index → entity

DHM

tenant → host → index → sourcetype (→ extras)

MHM

tenant → host → metric category

WLK

tenant → app → entity

FQM

tenant → data model → entity

FLX

plus dedicated converging and use-case graphs (tenant → service / group → members)

Each node is coloured by status (🟢 / 🟠 / 🔴 / 🔵), and a parent rolls up to the worst status among its descendants — so a single red leaf turns its whole branch red, letting you trace a problem from the tenant down to the offending entity at a glance. You can search the graph, filter to All / Down / Up, and cap the number of leaf nodes drawn (default 150) on large tenants.

See also