topic Re: Can I set the clientName in deploymentclient.conf through the CLI? in Deployment Architecture

Can I set the clientName in deploymentclient.conf through the CLI?

chris94089 — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 04:40:23 GMT

Greetings,

Can I set the clientName in deploymentclient.conf through the CLI?

This has been asked before several times.

in 2012 https://community.splunk.com/t5/Deployment-Architecture/Set-deployment-client-name-in-CLI/td-p/33613

2016 https://community.splunk.com/t5/Getting-Data-In/Can-I-set-the-clientName-in-deploymentclient-conf-through-the/m-p/227222

I don't see anything jumping out at me here, but I could be wrong. https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Forwarder/8.0.5/Forwarder/SupportedCLIcommands

So I thought I would ask again to confirm.

The use case for it would be remote customers looking to onboard their universal forwarder on their machine to our deployment server, pretty straightforward. Isn't asking them to manually alter their .conf file bad practice?

Thanks

Re: Can I set the clientName in deploymentclient.conf through the CLI?

richgalloway — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 13:36:52 GMT

The deployment client name defaults to the host name, which is sufficient in most cases. I don't know of and can't find any CLI command to change that value. IMO, asking a customer to edit a config file is not much worse than asking them to run a command.

Re: Can I set the clientName in deploymentclient.conf through the CLI?

chris94089 — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 16:14:40 GMT

Host name would be helpful but I did not come across that here https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/8.0.5/Updating/Configuredeploymentclients

in the Set a Client Name section it says the default Client Name is a GUID and some of the screenshots go on to show GUID's in the deployment server UI.

Looking at the UI examples again, I do see the hostname is visible. Is this what admin's end up using to identify their UF's?

Thanks for the reply.

Re: Can I set the clientName in deploymentclient.conf through the CLI?

richgalloway — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 18:01:48 GMT

IME, the default settings for client name have been sufficient and is what admins have used in their server classes.
You can, however, use clientName in deploymentclient.conf to be able to filter on other strings.