Machine data is produced by the many functions carried out by computers and other mechanical machines. If you work in an environment that is rich in machine data, you will most likely have many sources of readily available data inputs for Splunk. However, to facilitate learning in this book, we will use a Splunk add-on called the Splunk Eventgen to easily build real-time and randomized web log data. This is the type of data that would be produced by a web-based e-commerce company.
If you need more detailed information about Eventgen, you can follow the project's GitHub repository at https://github.com/splunk/eventgen/.