Impacts of installing splunk in root vs opt

[ialahdal]

I am new to splunk and came to an environment that's been previously installed and managed by someone else, I noticed through the monitoring console that all entities e.g(cluster maser, IFs, indexers, search heads, etc) are showing /as a mount point in the "Monitoring console > resource usage > Machine" except the 4th indexer which was installed by someone else, it shows /opt as a mount point.

My question is what are the impacts of having the mount point being root vs something else like "opt"??
Also would be best practice to move everything out of root to match the 4th indexer or the other way around??

Thanks.

[richgalloway · Accepted solution]

I recommend Splunk not share the same file system as the root directory. This is especially important if $SPLUNK_DB is also in the root directory. The goal is to prevent a full Splunk directory from preventing the OS from functioning normally. I've also seen the reverse happen, that is large OS files consumed enough disk space to put Splunk below its minimum free space and so it stopped running searches.