Syslogs from devices to different indexers with same index name

[shubham87]

Hi,

We are planning to use TCP syslog to send logs from networks devices to heavy forwarders and from there to indexers. Heavy forwarders will be load balanced using external load balancer and Heavy forwarder will be configured to send logs to two indexers using internal splunk forwarder load balancing in outputs.conf.

Considering this, logs from same network device will be divided between Heavy forwarders and hence indexers as well. Are there any challenges in this setup which i am not aware of? We will be using ES app for event corelation and security alerting.

Will Search Head be able to corelate events coming from same source but being stored onto different indexers. Is there something which i need to take care of?

Regards
Shubham

[martin_mueller]

The heavy forwarders won't store the events, assuming you didn't tell them to indexAndForward. As a result, only your indexing tier will store the logs.

Your search head will be able to use the loadbalanced indexers as long as you tell it to search both indexers in your distributed search config. It'll automatically treat each indexer as a fraction of the entire data set and merge accordingly.

It sounds as if you're sending syslog directly to your HFs? Read this: http://www.georgestarcher.com/splunk-success-with-syslog/

[woodcock]

What @martin_mueller said but also don't use Heavy Forwarders for that; use plain Universal Forwarders.