Implementing Splunk: Big Data Reporting and Development for Operational Intelligence

Splunk instance types

In a distributed deployment, different Splunk processes will serve different purposes. There are four stages of processing that are generally spread across two to four layers. The stages of processing include:

• input: This stage consumes raw data, from log files, ports, or scripts
• parsing: This stage splits raw data into events, parses time, sets base metadata, runs transforms, and so on
• indexing: This stage stores the data and optimizes indexes
• searching: This stage runs queries and presents the results to the user

These different stages can all be accomplished in one process, but splitting them across servers can improve performance as log volumes and search load increase.

Splunk forwarders

Each machine that contains the log ...