Should we install universal forwarders at each of our branch locations to forward data directly to Splunk Cloud?

[roacha]

We are looking at leveraging Splunk Cloud and we have branch locations all over the country in which we will need to forward logs into the Splunk Cloud.

Do you recommend that we install Universal Forwarders (UF) at each branch location and just forward directly to Splunk Cloud? Or is there a reason to use a Heavy Forwarder? I would think we would want the parsing/indexing being done in the cloud vs locally.

Thanks!

[ChrisG]

Universal forwarders are the way to go unless you specifically need to parse, filter, or route the data before you index it.

See Types of forwarders in the Forwarding Data manual for more information and a side-by-side comparison.

[niemesrw]

To that point, if you're going to use splunk cloud, you may want to continue down the path of infrastructure / configuration minimization. Read: a Heavy Forwarder is more infrastructure & configuration to maintain. You may need to consider them in the future, but I'd start off with just the UF for now.