I know this is an old forum but I'm having this same issue. My distributedsearch.conf was empty. Shoud I add the values mentioned in that scenario?      ... View more

 How did you determine this? - This is what the Forwarder Management Web UI shows us, client phone home time stamp coincides with the restart.  ... View more

Still no success after attempting all the steps below. Checked splunkd log on a few fowarders as well as the Deployment server and neither indicated connection errors. One question I have is in regards to indexes. From the webui i see the _dsphonehome, _dsappevent, _dsclient, but I don't see those indexes in the indexes.conf file on the deployment server. Another note is I found this and wondering if this could help? Our Splunk instance is at version 9.3.1.   https://community.splunk.com/t5/Splunk-Enterprise/After-upgrading-my-DS-to-Enterprise-9-2-2-clients-can-t-connect/m-p/695607 ... View more