How do disk space issues occur in Splunk indexers and what are the options to troubleshoot or prevent this from happening?

[Kaushikkatta03]

I was trying to figure it out how disk space issues occur in the indexers and what are the possible outcomes to get on from it?

[renjith_nair · Accepted solution]

Splunk Enterprise stores all of the data it processes in indexes. An index is a collection of databases, which are subdirectories located in $SPLUNK_HOME/var/lib/splunk. Indexes consist of two types of files: rawdata files and index files.

Splunk does compression of data when it's writing to the disk However, the more you store, the more disk space will be used.

You can implement data retention in splunk using bucket rolling (internal splunk mechanism) . Below link will give you an idea about how the index and bucket works.

https://wiki.splunk.com/Deploy:BucketRotationAndRetention

As mentioned in the link, you can change parameters in the indexes.conf to adjust data retension.

http://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/6.3.3/Admin/Indexesconf