Getting Data In

how does time synchronization work between forwarder and indexer?

gnanaraj_mcc
Loves-to-Learn Lots

Hi
we have hosts sending logs to indexer using universal forwarders. The hosts are spread across different time zones.
i want to know how the indexer Synchronize different time zones into one. Can you refer any document or something?

thank you

0 Karma

woodcock
Esteemed Legend

The Indexers work by doing whatever you tell them to do. If you tell them nothing about timezones, then each indexer will assume that any event with a date missing a timezone is using the same timezone as that Indexer's host OS and that event will be assigned a value of local for date_zone. This is TERRIBLE rookie admin, though; I do not allow events with date_zone = local to exist on any of my Indexers. Each event should EITHER have the TZ value inside of each event's timestamp OR each host+sourcetype combination should have a TZ=foo/bar in a props.conf on every Indexer. That is the way to do it or you are going to have broken (mis-normalized) times inside of Splunk events (all over the place).

woodcock
Esteemed Legend

In other words, there is no synchronization, there is a normalization to UTC in the form of time_t AKA epoch.

0 Karma

sloshburch
Ultra Champion

@woodcock strikes again! FTW!

gcusello
SplunkTrust
SplunkTrust
0 Karma
Got questions? Get answers!

Join the Splunk Community Slack to learn, troubleshoot, and make connections with fellow Splunk practitioners in real time!

Meet up IRL or virtually!

Join Splunk User Groups to connect and learn in-person by region or remotely by topic or industry.

Get Updates on the Splunk Community!

Splunk Enterprise Security: An Automated Phishing Response Workflow

Originally posted on Splunk.com.   Key takeaways  The volume of phishing emails can overwhelm even the most ...

Sharper ES Detections, Agentic AI Integrations, Smarter Workload Management, and More ...

Splunk Lantern is Splunk’s customer success center that provides practical guidance from Splunk experts on key ...

Data Outage Monitoring and Reporting

We’ve all been there, right? Living our best life, working on our Splunk environment, when out of nowhere a ...