Licensing costs when forwarding data from independent splunk instance to another?

[ckurtz]

I have a vendor who has their own standalone Splunk environment. They are forwarding cooked (already indexed) data to our Splunk environment from their Splunk environment.

My understanding is there should be no license cost to me, as the receiver, since the data has already been "cooked" (indexed and counted against their license) by their Splunk instance. The vendor feels that it will count against my license as well.

Anyone have the definitive word on this?

[gkanapathy · Accepted solution]

The data will be reindexed after being received if it is was forwarded, and therefore will count against your license. Forwarding does not indicate whether the data was previously indexed or not.