Getting Data In

Delete index foobar info older than 2 weeks.

dcroteau
Splunk Employee
Splunk Employee

we only want to save the log info for 2 weeks. I tried to set this up by modifying the frozen time, but it doesn’t seem to work. How can I delete info from index foobar database that is older than 2 weeks?

Tags (1)

gkanapathy
Splunk Employee
Splunk Employee

frozenTimePeriodInSecs does not guarantee deletion after that time. It simply means that data may be deleted after that time. Data older than that will in fact be deleted as long as everything else that it shares an index bucket with is also eligible for deletion. This is because deletion (by which I mean actual deletion not the surgical | delete command - that doesn't really "delete" data) is done on a whole-bucket basis, so unless an entire bucket is eligible for deletion, none of the data will be deleted.

Lowell
Super Champion

Off the top of my head, you will probably need to make sure that your buckets are rotated quite frequently, which can be done by setting a very low maximum hot size or setting a short max time span, or both, I suppose.

indexes.conf:

[foobar]

# 2 day max for hot
maxHotSpanSecs=172800

# 200 Mb max for hot
maxDataSize = 200

# Expire data after 2 weeks
frozenTimePeriodInSecs=1209600


BTW, you can force a delete of events older than 2 weeks by searching for events more than two weeks old, then piping that search through the | delete command. However, this does not free up any disk space; so I'm guessing this isn't what your looking for.

Lowell
Super Champion

Can you post your current index settings for the index in question. (You can run btool indexes layer <your_index_name> to show all the settings applied to your index.)

0 Karma
Got questions? Get answers!

Join the Splunk Community Slack to learn, troubleshoot, and make connections with fellow Splunk practitioners in real time!

Meet up IRL or virtually!

Join Splunk User Groups to connect and learn in-person by region or remotely by topic or industry.

Get Updates on the Splunk Community!

Index This | What travels the world but is also stuck in place?

April 2026 Edition  Hayyy Splunk Education Enthusiasts and the Eternally Curious!   We’re back with this ...

Discover New Use Cases: Unlock Greater Value from Your Existing Splunk Data

Realizing the full potential of your Splunk investment requires more than just understanding current usage; it ...

Continue Your Journey: Join Session 2 of the Data Management and Federation Bootcamp ...

As data volumes continue to grow and environments become more distributed, managing and optimizing data ...