Can a 6.5.2 universal forwarder send data to an http event collector?

[tgfurnish]

Is it possible to configure a 6.5.2 universal forwarder to send events to an http event collector (on 7.2)?

I have a series of universal forwarders that had been sending logs to an old indexer on port 9997 -- both the forwarders and the indexer are slated for retirement "soon", part of an app that's been mostly retired already, but I need to keep them going a few more months.   The indexer hardware died badly, and I thought I'd easily be able to switch these UFs over to our current indexer, which runs 7.2 (upgrading soon to 8.x), but that indexer only listens using the HEC on port 8088.  It's behind an AWS ALB, so opening up port 9997 would be problematic.

Is this even *supposed* to be possible (sending events from 6.5.2 UF to 7.2 HEC)?

I've tried putting the following into local/outputs.conf, but it seems to have no impact.  Splunk isn't complaining about the statements when it starts up, and it also isn't sending any network traffic on port 8088.

[httpout]
httpEventCollectorToken = [642bc63f-8e62-4b3e-9579-f146345eeaa2]
uri = http://splunk.domain-name.com:8088
batchSize = 65536
batchTimeout = 5

[richgalloway · Accepted solution]

Sending to HEC is a new feature added to UFs in version 8-something.  Versions prior to that do not support HEC.

[tgfurnish]

Thank you!