How to get data from host to heavy forwarder to indexer?

[mrkris82]

I have an indexer, search head, heavy forwarder and license master server configured. I also have a test server (host) with the Splunk agent installed. I am new to all of this and standing this up in our test environment and wanted to get started by getting logs from the test server....to the heavy forwarder......to the indexer....so they can be parsed and searched from the search head server. I'm not quite sure how to make all this happen, even after reading docs and watching some videos, so I'd be happy to try any of your suggestions.
Thanks in advance.

[skoelpin]

You should reconsider using the heavy forwarder and try using the universal forwarder..

To forward data.. You will need to allow the indexer to listen on port 9997 then configure the inputs.conf and outputs.conf on your forwarder.

Your inputs.conf will tell the Splunk forwarder where the logs live and what data to forward while your outputs.conf tells Splunk where to send its data (i.e. the indexer(s))..

Inputs.conf looks like this

[monitor:///opt/log/www*/access.log]
index=web
sourcetype=access_combined

outputs.conf looks like this

[tcpout]
defaultGroup = default-autolb-group

[tcpout:default-autolb-group]
disabled = false
server = Indexer1:9997,Indexer2:9997

You can do this at the appl level which is preferred, or you can do it at the system level which is against best practices..

$SPLUNK_HOME/etc/apps/<APP_NAME>/local

[ChrisG]

Is there a reason that you are using the heavy forwarder instead of the universal forwarder? Did you install the forwarder on your test server where the logs are?

There are a lot of docs about forwarding data, if you didn't start with the overview topic Use forwarders to get data in in the Getting Data In manual, that might be a useful summary.