How Do We Convert Our Heavy Forwarders to Universal Forwarders

[rpattison]

When we first rolled out Splunk to our forwarders we installed the full version. We would now like to convert them to Universal Forwarders to reduce the footprint on the servers. All the documentation talks about converting from a light forwarder to a universal forwarder and using the MIGRATESPLUNK=1 option to convert the checkpoint data. Will that also work when going from a Heavy Forwarder to a Universal Forwarder?

[somesoni2]

If your HF is not doing any data parsing, you can just following same instruction for "migrating from light forwarder to universal forwarder". If your HF is doing data parsing, then first migrate those data parsing setting to your indexers, then follow those steps.

[woodcock]

Assuming you are using a Deployment Server (which will take care of $SPLUNK_HOME/etc/apps) and that you are using your HF only as a UF (not indexing/transforming), then save these directories:

$SPLUNK_HOME/var/
$SPLUNK_HOME/etc/users/ #NOTE: this should not be necessary but just in case
$SPLUNK_HOME/etc/apps/
$SPLUNK_HOME/etc/system/

Delete all of $SPLUNK_HOME, install UF, restore $SPLUNK_HOME/var/ (the rest of the stuff is "just in case"), point to the DS and start.