Sourcetype / Line-breaking issue with multi-timestamp events

[flle]

Hi,

I am having an issue with line breaking.
My events look like this:

2012-04-17 11:24:45 ***************** rule violation! *****************
contract number:    1234         rule violation action: 2 (FREEZE TRANSACTION)
session id: xxxxx60M94FTrGmGL8zSjtYkJ38LTmtvrnXmnBjhTMGN2np4VVMy!486267940!1329214508088
tool type: Browser
matched rule: XXXXX => rule violation action: 2 (FREEZE_TRANSACTION)
first request: 
    requestURI...................: /ClientCustomer/root/extras/login
    request-timestamp............: 2012-04-17 11:15:08,090
    AL_ENV_REMOTE_ADDR...........: 192.168.1.5
    ISP..........................: CH-CABLECOM (ZURICH, SWITZERLAND)
    User-Agent...................: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_8) AppleWebKit/534.50.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.6 Safari/533.22.3

... cut ...

Besides the timestamp at the beginning of the event there are several others in within the event (i.e. request-timestamp). I want to break only before the initial timestamp. For this I created a sourcetype with data preview by importing an ascii log file. The created props.conf:

[req_validator]
BREAK_ONLY_BEFORE = \d+-\d+-\d+\s+\d+:\d+:\d+\s+\*
SHOULD_LINEMERGE = true
NO_BINARY_CHECK = 1
pulldown_type = 1

This works just fine.
Then I took this source type definition and copied it to a Splunk forwarder config which reads this logfile in real time. Props.conf on the forwarder:

[req_validator]
BREAK_ONLY_BEFORE = \d+-\d+-\d+\s+\d+:\d+:\d+\s+\*
SHOULD_LINEMERGE = true

I removed pulldown_type and NO_BINARY_CHECK because both should be irrelevant for my source type.

inputs.conf:

[monitor:///opt/logs/client/app/CustomerClient/req_validator.log]
disabled = false
index = xyz 
sourcetype = req_validator

The log file is read ok, in Search I can see that Splunk uses the source type req_validator, but the line breaks are wrong. It breaks before every line with a timestamp. It somehow looks like the default line break behaviour.
I also tried several things with TIME_FORMAT and TIME_PREFIX but nothing worked.

So is there any default configuration parameters which are automatically set/active in props.conf or inputs.conf which might interfere with my line-break config?

Thanks for any hints

Regards
Florian

[Ayn · Accepted solution]

What kind of forwarder is this? Non-heavy forwarders (Light and Universal) don't do this kind of parsing of events, so if that's the case for you you should be applying the settings on your indexer, not the forwarders.

[flle]

Solved. It's a universal forwarder, so no parsing of sourcetype definitions in props.conf on the forwarde. After defining it on the indexers it works as expected.