Splunk Core Certified Advanced Power User Practice Test 2026 – The Comprehensive All-in-One Guide to Exam Success!

The function that returns the first seen value in a field is indeed the function known as "first." This function is specifically designed to retrieve the very first occurrence of a value in a specified field across the events that are processed.

Using "first" can be particularly useful when you want to understand the initial state of a particular metric or attribute within your dataset over a specified time range or search criteria. For instance, if you have a dataset with timestamps and want to know the initial status of a system or user when their data was first recorded, using the "first" function allows you to quickly extract that information without sifting through each individual entry manually.

In contrast, the other options serve different purposes. The "sum" function calculates the total of a numerical field, the "range" function computes the difference between the maximum and minimum values, and "var" calculates the variance of a numerical field. Each of these functions operates on the data in its own way and does not provide the first value of a field, making them unsuitable for the specific demand of retrieving the first seen value.