Configure an Elastic Load Balancer for the Splunk Add-on for Amazon Kinesis Firehose

If your indexers are in an AWS Virtual Private Cloud, send your Amazon Kinesis Firehose data to an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) with sticky sessions enabled and cookie expiration disabled. Follow the directions on this page to configure an ELB that can integrate with the Splunk HTTP event collector.

If your indexers are not in an AWS Virtual Private Cloud, this procedure does not apply to you. See Install the Splunk Add-on for Amazon Kinesis Firehose on a distributed Splunk Enterprise deployment.

You must use an ELB. Application load balancers and network load balancers are not supported.

Create an elastic load balancer

Follow these steps to configure your ELB properly to receive data. For more detailed information about Elastic Load Balancers, see Elastic Load Balancing Documentation in the AWS documentation.

Prerequisites

• Amazon Kinesis Firehose requires the HEC endpoint to be terminated with a valid CA-signed SSL certificate. Import your valid CA-signed SSL certificates to AWS Certificate Manager or AWS IAM before creating or modifying your elastic load balancer. See Configure Security Settings in the AWS documentation.

Steps

1. Open the Amazon EC2 console.
2. On the navigation pane, under Load balancing, select Load Balancers.
3. Create a classic load balancer with the following parameters:

   Field in Amazon Web Services ELB UI	Value
   Select load balancer type	Classic load balancer
   Load balancer name	Name of your load balancer
   Load balancer protocol	HTTPS. Use the default or change the load balancer port.
   Assign or select a security group	The chosen security group needs to allow inbound traffic from load balancer to HTTP event collector port on indexers.
   Configure security settings	Select your CA-signed SSL certificate that you imported in the prerequisites step.
   Health Check settings	Ping protocol: HTTPS Ping port: 8088 Ping path: HTTPS:8088/services/collector/health/1.0 Timeout: 5 seconds Interval: 30 seconds Unhealthy threshold: 2 Healthy threshold: 10
   Add EC2 instances	Add all indexers that you are using to index data with this add-on.

4. Click Review and create, and verify in the following review page that your load balancer details are correct. After creating your elastic load balancer, modify the port configuration and the attributes as described below.

Modify an existing load balancer with the proper settings

Prerequisites

• An elastic load balancer that has been configured with the correct basic settings. This includes setting the load balancer protocol to HTTPS and uploading a valid CA-signed SSL certificate.
  

Steps

1. From the Load balancers page in the EC2 console, select your elastic load balancer with the basic settings already configured.
2. Modify your load balancer with the following parameters:

   Field in Amazon Web Services ELB UI	Value
   Health Check settings	Ping protocol: HTTPS Ping port: 8088 Ping path: HTTPS:8088/services/collector/health/1.0 Timeout: 5 seconds Interval: 30 seconds Unhealthy threshold: 2 Healthy threshold: 10
   Port configuration	Under Edit stickiness, select Enable load balancer generated cookie stickiness. Leave expiration period blank.
   Attributes	Under Edit idle timeout, enter 60 seconds.

Next step
Install the Splunk Add-on for Amazon Kinesis Firehose on a distributed Splunk Enterprise deployment