Can you help me with my upgrade plans for 6.5.2?

[jiaqya]

Hi,

I just need a suggestion on upgrade path.

i have 6.5.2 version installed on SH/Indexer and Forwarders.

How to upgrade these to latest 7.x version — is there any order I need to follow?

Can I upgrade only the SH to 7.x and leave the Indexer/Forwarder at 6.5.2 during testing, or should i upgrade all of them at one go..

or should i look at compatibility issues ?

[nickhills · Accepted solution]

Take a look at this chart:
TLDR, you are OK to leave your UF at 6.5.x while upgrading.
https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Forwarder/7.2.4/Forwarder/Compatibilitybetweenforwardersandind...

As a general rule, use this order:
[SHC deployer], Search heads, [Cluster Master], Indexers, [Other Splunk Servers - HF/LM/DS], Forwarders

[jiaqya]

So, search head has to be of a higher version than indexers
and
indexers can be of higher version than forwarders.

[nickhills]

Yes,

A SH will complain if it is running a earlier version than your indexers (although in practice I have never noticed an issue with it - its just annoying that it nags)

Indexers can be higher version than forwarders, and backwards compatibility extends back several versions. Splunk 5 was released in 2012 and is still "supported" (as-in 'it works') on 7.2.5, so you get plenty of time to upgrade them 🙂

[jiaqya]

Another question i have on this. we also have universal forwarder agents installed on servers which send data to the forwarders. Can you direct me to compatibility of the uf agent version wrt to forwarder version of 6.5.2

[jiaqya]

Thanks. so i can upgrade each component in order and there is no hurry to upgrade as they are compatible. this is what i wanted to know ,thanks again.