License: Do I have to pay for an extra license in a hybrid environment?

[tomasnelson]

I'm planning an environment where I want to have all my universal forwarder clients to a local splunk server and this server makes the forwarder to an instance in the cloud.

do I need to buy an extra local license to the cloud license?

[lfedak_splunk]

Hey @tomasnelson, if they solved your problem, remember to "√Accept" an answer to award karma points 🙂

[gjanders · Accepted solution]

Splunk licensing (official documentation here) is measured in terms of indexed data per day, the size measured is raw data size and normally purchased in GB/day.
The source that forwarded the data should not make any difference to your licensing / cloud purchase.

The volume of data per day is going to influence how much license you require in your cloud (or on prem instance).

Forwarders do not require a license to forward data, you can use the forwarder license on heavy forwarders or point them to a license master, either way the license will not be used for forwarding of data.