Checklist before installing Splunk?

[spectrum2035]

Hello All,

We are planning to put new instance of Splunk which has Search Head clusters Indexer clusters. All the machines are running on RHEL 7.2. Do you have any checklist which I can go through before installing Splunk?

Like connectivity between servers, ulimits, permissions etc.

[sayaksplunk]

Plan your architecture based on the requirement. While determining the same you need to take into consideration the below points.
• The overall goal of the deployment
• Key users, their goals and use cases.
• Expected daily data ingestion.
• Data sources.
• Data retention.
• List of user access roles required.
Taking the above points into consideration would help you in architecting the Splunk deployment better.

Once the hardware is in place, you may follow the below mentioned best practices while building a Splunk instance.
• Do not run Splunk as super-user. e.g. root in *nix and administrator in Windows.
• Create a user account that is used to run Splunk –
For input, Splunk must be able to access data sources, On *NIX, /var/log is not typically open to non-root accounts, On *NIX, non-root accounts cannot access ports < 1024
On Windows use a domain account if Splunk must connect to other servers otherwise, use a local machine account that can run services make sure the Splunk account can access scripts used for inputs and alerts.
• Use a time synchronization service such as NTP. It is imperative that your Splunk indexer and production servers have standardized time configuration. Clock skew between hosts can affect search results.
Linux settings recommendations.
• Increase ulimit settings –These parameters need to be increased to allow for many buckets/forwarders/users
Please refer to the below document link:
https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/latest/Troubleshooting/ulimitErrors
• Turn Transparent Huge Pages (THP) off on Splunk Enterprise servers
Please refer the below link for details.
https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/latest/ReleaseNotes/SplunkandTHP
Post this you can follow the Splunk installation guide and install the downloaded rpm.

[uhaq]

What version of Splunk are you planning on installing?

There are some general things like you mentioned ulimits, tph, create splunk account etc.

[spectrum2035]

We are having Splunk version 7.1.2

[richgalloway]

Are you creating a brand-new Splunk installation with SH cluster and indexer cluster? Or are you adding a Splunk instance to an existing cluster?

[spectrum2035]

We have an existing INDX and SHC with Splunk version 7.1.2 and adding more servers in to the cluster.