We have a clustered environment that includes heavy forwarders, universal forwarders, and forwarders under Windows. The development team sometimes do performance tests and these generate a lot of data that we don't want to be indexed. We could add a new rule on the heavy forwarders to send to null queue all events during the tests , but can this be done at forwarder or universal forwarder level? Do you think that there is a better way to achieve this ?
Thank you
You can have the data indexed into specific indexes or add a specific field which indicates that this is a performance test data. Then it's easy to "simply" delete this type of data.
Have a look at this Splunk documentation to know more about event routing and filter.
http://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/6.4.0/Forwarding/Routeandfilterdatad#Filter_event_data_a...
The send to null queue can be done on universal forwarder if it's to be done without looking into individual events (purely based on index/source/sourcetype/host). If you need to look at the event data to filter, than you need to do routing/filtering in heavy forwarder/indexer
It looks like this only can be done at hf or indexer level as I suspected, but not in universal forwarder:
"Although similar to forwarder-based routing, queue routing can be performed by an indexer, as well as a heavy forwarder"