Splunk for Exchange for indexers

[echalex]

Hi,

I'm about to deploy Splunk for Exchange. One thing I'm noticing is that the documentation says all TAs should be installed on the indexers. Howevers, the indexes.conf only exists in the main app itself (ie. "Splunk for Exchange"). I do need the indexes.conf, don't I?

That's my first question. My second question is: should I then pull out that particular file and add it to a small app which I deploy to my indexers? Or, as I'm doing now with other indexes, adding those indexes to a generic Our_Indexes app, which defines all indexes and does nothing else?

[ahall_splunk · Accepted solution]

The documentation shouldn't say "deploy all TA's on the indexers" - if it does, then that's a mistake and I will get it corrected.

You only need to generate indices on the indexers, so feel free to merge the indexes.conf from the main app with your Our_indexes app.

[ahall_splunk]

Thanks for the pointer - we'll get the docs corrected.

The directives you point to are not required on the indexer - just create the indices and you should be fine.

[echalex]

To be clear, the props.conf of the TAs do include props.conf-files. These have settings for SHOULD_LINEMERGE and CHECK_FOR_HEADER. To my understtanding, these are index-time directives and since I'm using the universal forwarder, there is no parsing on the Exchange host itself.

Does this matter?

[echalex]

Thank you very much for a clear and concise answer. 🙂

Here's the documentation I was reading.

• If your central Splunk instance is distributed (meaning that it contains indexer(s) and search head(s) on separate systems):

  • - You must install all of the technology add-ons (TAs) onto every indexer in the instance.