Yesterday I updated my private Splunk 6 instance to 6.0.1 and after the update the Forwarder Management did not work anymore. The error message was something like "402 License Problem...".
The free license doesn't contain the DeployServer feature, and hence doesn't come with deployment/forwarder management - see http://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/latest/Admin/MoreaboutSplunkFree#What_is_included_with_S... for reference.
According to the docs this has always been the case, don't know if forwarder management was included in 6.0.0 (by accident?) and then removed.
You could connect your testing instance to your regular Splunk Enterprise license master and get the full features that way. Just make sure your tests don't blow your license volume... alternatively, just use the download trial license for testing.
Well.. I don't think that is totally accurate... it partially works but only enough to drive me crazy. I am trying to test out Splunk6 before migrating and I got as far as getting the agent to show up in the management console and even recieve an update... but it will not apply or use the changes i sent over.. It doesn't seem like the feature is broken enough to let me know why... frustrating.
The Free vs. Enterprise chart is incorrect. I've asked for that web page to be updated. As martin_mueller said: deployment server is disabled in the free version, so forwarder management will not work.
Indeed, that's contradicting the documentation. Can't help you there 😞
Seems like it, but according to the following chart it should be included in Splunk Free:
http://www.splunk.com/view/SP-CAAAE8W