Reasons to have a separate DEV environment:
1) Developers can't accidentally break Prod.
2) Dev doesn't steal resources from Prod.
3) Dev can test the latest rev of Splunk without affecting Prod.
4) Simpler management. No complicated permissions on Prod for the Dev team. Just give Dev admin rights on their own box so they can shoot themselves in the foot if they want.
5) No need for Dev to wait for the Prod admin to install updates, etc.
Dev should still have read-only access to Prod, however.
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