About managing indexes
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About managing indexes
When you add data to Splunk, Splunk processes it and stores it in an index. By default, data you feed to Splunk is stored in the main index, but you can create and specify other indexes for Splunk to use for different data inputs.
Indexes are stored in directories, which are located in $SPLUNK_HOME/var/lib/splunk. An index is a collection of directories. Index directories are also called buckets and are organized by age. For detailed information on index storage, see "How Splunk stores indexes".
In addition to the main index, Splunk comes preconfigured with a number of internal indexes. Internal indexes are named starting with an underscore (_). The internal indexes store audit, indexing volume, Splunk logging, and other data. You can see a full list of indexes in Splunk Web if you click on the Manager link in the upper right hand of Splunk Web and then click Indexes:
- main: The default Splunk index. All processed data is stored here unless otherwise specified.
- _internal: This index includes internal logs and metrics from Splunk's processors.
- sampledata: A small amount of sample data is stored here for training purposes.
- _audit: Events from the file system change monitor, auditing, and all user search history.
Read on in this section for information about ways to manage the indexing process, including:
- Setting up multiple indexes, moving indexes, removing index data
- Managing disk usage by limiting index size or configuring segmentation
If you're interested in the indexing process
Refer to:
- The section "How indexing works" in this manual.
- The section "How Splunk stores indexes" in this manual.
- The section "Set up and use summary indexes" in the Knowledge Manager manual, for information on working with extremely large datasets.
- The topic about Search performance on the Community Wiki.
This documentation applies to the following versions of Splunk: 4.2 , 4.2.1 , 4.2.2 , 4.2.3 , 4.2.4 , 4.2.5 , 4.3 , 4.3.1 , 4.3.2 , 4.3.3 , 4.3.4 , 4.3.5 , 4.3.6 View the Article History for its revisions.