On a Windows Server when I go to Settings \ Monitoring Console and launch it, there is a Menu item called: Forwarders: Instance which appears not to be configured and when I try to run setup I get this warning about it effecting performance, so my question is, are any of you running this feature?
Forwarder monitoring dashboards provide information on forwarder activity and throughput. If you turn on forwarder monitoring, Splunk Enterprise enables a scheduled search named "DMC Forwarder - Build Asset Table" that relies on internal network input metrics that your indexers record. If you have many forwarders, this search can significantly affect the search workload of the indexers.
To mitigate the cost of this search, increase the data collection interval so that the search runs less frequently. Learn More
A thousand forwarders shouldn't be a problem for an MC and 16 indexers.
I can't say I've seen the MC consume a lot of resources. The warning you cite may not apply in your environment. Do you have many forwarders?
Rich thank you for offering to help, we have two Deployment servers one is for our servers and so over 500 Windows and Linux servers forward to a dozen Indexers
in addition to that Deployment server we have another Deployment server dedicated to all our workstations so another 500 plus Windows workstation machines forward to the same dozen Indexers
hope this paints a better picture for you
A thousand forwarders shouldn't be a problem for an MC and 16 indexers.