With Splunk 6, Do I Need Fire Brigade TA?

[David]

I love Fire Brigade for the visibility it provides me on my data. However, I'm wondering whether I still need to install the TA on all of my indexers, with the distributed dbinspect functionality in Splunk 6. Can anyone help?

[ppablo]

FYI, Fire Brigade version 2 will no longer be updated (latest version is 2.0.3). The newer versions 2.0.4 and higher will now be available with the original “Fire Brigade” app on Splunkbase which was just updated to support Splunk 6.3. This is noted on the page for Fire Brigade on Splunkbase:
https://splunkbase.splunk.com/app/1581/

If you have any questions, ping the developer of the app @sowings

Cheers!

[sowings · Accepted solution]

In small environments, the dbinspect command (read: TA-fire_brigade) run from the search head is probably OK. This means you'd only install it (and the main app together) on the search head. However, in larger environments, you'll end up triggering the subsearch limit (in the map command) of 10,000 rows and possibly end up with partial data for the dbinspect info.

So, more than about 4-5 indexers, go with TA-fire_brigade on each indexer.

In the latter case, you may want to run the "Update monitored list from REST" search string on the search head once to populate the file "monitored_indexes.csv", just to satisfy one panel on the cumulative overview ("Quick Overview") dashboard.