Getting Data In

How do you audit user logins on a forwarder?

thisissplunk
Builder

I need to change the admin account password and want to make sure I don't break any automated tasks by doing it. How do I determine if the Splunk admin account has been used to log into and do things on the forwarder?

0 Karma
1 Solution

thisissplunk
Builder

Grepping through the splunk/var/log on the server in question did it.

View solution in original post

0 Karma

thisissplunk
Builder

Grepping through the splunk/var/log on the server in question did it.

0 Karma

somesoni2
Revered Legend

The forwarder should be logging user-login events into $Splunk_home/var/log/splunk/audit.log which are monitored and goes to index=_audit (logs are same as what you'll find on your search heads e.g. index=_audit sourcetype=audittrail action=login*). AFAIK, forwarding of _audit index data from forwarder is disabled from default, so you'd need to enable that and should be able to monitor user logins.

thisissplunk
Builder

Great thank you. So if I don't see the admin account appearing in this year's audit log events I should be good?

0 Karma

somesoni2
Revered Legend

Yes. But I'm not sure the logs will be available for that long. Check the retention period of _audit index.

0 Karma
Get Updates on the Splunk Community!

Splunk Decoded: Service Maps vs Service Analyzer Tree View vs Flow Maps

It’s Monday morning, and your phone is buzzing with alert escalations – your customer-facing portal is running ...

What’s New in Splunk Observability – September 2025

What's NewWe are excited to announce the latest enhancements to Splunk Observability, designed to help ITOps ...

Fun with Regular Expression - multiples of nine

Fun with Regular Expression - multiples of nineThis challenge was first posted on Slack #regex channel ...