Deployment Server Clients

[BRFZ]

Hello,

I know that it is necessary to do this for the forwarders but I would like to confirm whether it is necessary to add other components (such as indexers, search heads) as clients to our Deployment Server in Splunk environment.

We currently have a Deployment Server set up, but we are unsure if registering the other instances as clients is a required step, or if any specific configurations need to be made for each type of component.

Thank you in advance.

Best regards,

[BRFZ]

@richgalloway @PickleRick @isoutamo Thank you all for your responses. This information is very helpful for me to better understand this topic.

[PickleRick]

Adding to @richgalloway 's answer - DS is a central point to distribute config items packaged into apps to its clients. Strictly theoretically, any Splunk component can be a deployment client and use the DS to pull its apps from. But for some components (forwarders) it's the natural way and most often used (it's not, however, the only way to manage forwarders - you could use any configuration management tool of your choice if you feel more comfortable with it). For other ones (stand-alone search-heads or indexers) DS can be used but rarely is. There are some components (clustered search heads and clustered indexers) for which DS mustn't be used directly - they are managed by SHC deployer and Cluster Manager respectively. There are also some even more complicated scenarios but we'll not dig into them here since this is a relatively advanced topic.

TL;DR - While other components can sometimes be managed with DS as well, typically only forwarders are.

[isoutamo]

And never try to manage DS by itself! This will not end nice!
Be careful as some people confuse deployment server and SHC deployer. As already told those are different tools/roles and you must use correct one.

[PickleRick]

Yes. The naming is a bit confusing here...

[richgalloway · Accepted solution]

No, it is not necessary.  The Deployment Server has been used to manage indexers and search heads, but that's not its intended purpose.