In general, you can divide Splunk infrastructure into three layers. - Search Heads - if clustered they replicate some configuration between them within the cluster. Otherwise you use deployer to push configuration to them - Indexers - you use cluster master to push configuration - Forwarders - you use deployment server (sometimes you use deployment server to push configuration from DS to single search-heads or single indexers but that's a very unusual situation). There is no replication between layers as such. You could push from DS to deployer or cluster master but that's again - a very unusual situation. To make long story short - if you push something to a forwarder, it stays there. If you push something to search-heads, it's on search heads. And so on - you manage configuration on each layer separately. Oh, and you don't create indexes on HFs. Since HF only processes events and forwards events to indexers - you don't store events locally - you don't need indexes on HF.
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