Exploring Distributed Search

Splunk distributed search is all about the separation of search and indexing duties. In a standalone Splunk instance, there is no concept of distributed search because the duties of searching and indexing are handled by only one instance. If these duties are separated, there will be an opportunity to scale individual search heads and indexers to be more efficient and robust. In this chapter, you will learn about distributed search configuration and how knowledge bundles are replicated from search head to indexer. While distributed search is in action, there can always be scenarios where one or more instances might not perform as expected. In that case, we will examine the troubleshooting steps we can apply to overcome the issues or at least partially restore the search.

It is very important for system administrators to understand the various roles of Splunk instances in a distributed deployment and how search gets distributed to indexers. It is also...