Queries
Part of our Foundational Concepts series:
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A Humio query is much like a query to an SQL database. You write search terms to include or exclude values from a repository or view. Unlike most queries SQL, in Humio, you also do calculations and transform the data as part of the query.
To learn Humio's query language head over to the Query Language reference page.
Some filter, some transform and augment, others aggregate data into result sets like tables or bucketed time series.
Transformation Queries

Figure 341. Day of Week
Transformation expressions (also called Filter expressions) filter input or adds/removes/modifies fields on each event. These include filter expressions like:
time:dayOfWeekName(field=@timestamp, as=the_day)
This uses the time:dayOfWeekName()
function to
extract the day of the week from the timestamp for each event, and then
format that value so as to return the name of the day of the week
— and put that value in a field named, the day. You can see the
results in the screenshot in Figure 1 here.
A subset of the available query functions are known as Transformation
Functions, for example regex()
,
in()
or eval()
. Just like the
examples above they only adds/removes/modifies fields and never produce
new (additional) events as output.
If a query consists solely of transformation expressions it is known as filter query or transformation query. This kind of query are required when connecting Views with repositories.
Aggregation Queries
Aggregation expressions are always function calls. These functions can combine their input into a new structures or emit new events into the output stream.
A query becomes an aggregation
query
if it uses at least one aggregate function like
sum()
, count()
or
avg()
.
For example, the query count()
takes a stream of
events as its input, and produces a single record containing a
_count
field.
Below are some examples:
loglevel = ERROR | timechart()
x := y * 2 | bucket(function=sum(x))
Part of our Foundational Concepts series:
Previous Concept Events
Next Concept: Live Queries