the procedure for distributing secure passwords is documented here: http://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/6.0.1/Security/Deploysecurepasswordsacrossmultipleservers a good resource for "what gotchas are there?" info in general is this community-authored topic on the Community Wiki: http://wiki.splunk.com/Things_I_wish_I_knew_then here's a bullet item from that topic about splunk.secret: "Thinking about search head pooling or clustering? The splunk.secret file is important, because it helps set the encryption key used for things like SSL key files, LDAP service accounts, and so on. For systems that will need to share identical copies of files containing splunk encrypted password data, you may want to copy splunk.secret to such a system before the first time you start Splunk on it." ... View more

the documentation for this app is within the app itself. Download and install the app, then click on the documentation link. the documentation linked to in the other Answer is old, and only visible to Splunk employees. ... View more

there is a dboutput command currently in beta within the app. i'm not sure what the plan is, but you might want to try it out: http://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/DBX/latest/DeployDBX/Commands#dboutput ... View more