What is the best way to reload Windows event log data?

[jamesvz84]

I want to reload Windows event log data from the beginning of time for all hosts and remove all event log data that is currently there. What are the recommended steps to do that?

The current index we are using does not contain all historical event logs, so we want to just cleean it out and re-insert from beginning,

[yannK · Accepted solution]

To remove events from the index, they are not methods, you have to wait for the data to age.
However you can "hide" the events using the "delete" command, see http://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/6.0.2/Indexer/RemovedatafromSplunk

To reindex WinEventLog logs, you can reset a channel counters on an instance:

• stop the forwarder,
• on splunk 4.* and 5.* delete the counter files in $SPLUNK_HOME\var\lib\splunk\persistentstorage\WinEventLog
• in addition on splunk 6.*, delete the counter files in $SPLUNK_HOME\var\lib\splunk\modinputs\WinEventLog
• restart the forwarder

[shocko]

This helped me so thanks!