Compatibility between forwarders and Splunk Enterprise indexers

If you have Splunk Enterprise, note the following specific version compatibility requirements between forwarders and receiving indexers. A best practice is to have indexers be at the same or higher version than the forwarders they receive data from.

The following table shows which versions of forwarder and indexer are compatible. A best practice is to use indexers with versions that are the same or higher than forwarder versions.

• An X in a cell indicates that this version of forwarder can send event data to the corresponding version of indexer.
• An S in a cell indicates that this version of forwarder can send data to this version of indexer after you change the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)/Transport Layer Security (TLS) version and cipher suite on the forwarder. See Known Issues in the Splunk Enterprise Release Notes for instructions on changing the SSL/TLS version and cipher suite.
• An empty cell indicates that Splunk does not support sending any type of data from this version of forwarder to the corresponding version of indexer.

This table lists versions 4.3 and 5.0 for informational purposes only. Customers have reported that version 4.3 and 5.0 forwarders are technically compatible with some higher versions of indexer, but Splunk does not provide support for version 4.3 or 5.0 software. Version 5.0 reached its End of Life on November 30, 2017 and version 4.3 reached its end of life in 2014.

Forwarder version	Indexer version
	4.3 (NS)	5.0 (NS)	6.0-6.1	6.2-6.5
4.3 (NS)	X	X	X
5.0 (NS)	X	X	X
6.0-6.1		X	X	S
6.2-6.5			S	X

Features that require specific versions of universal forwarder and indexer

Some forwarding features require that both forwarder and receiver are at or above a specific version number.

The following features are available only if both forwarders and the receiving indexers they connect to are at version 6.0 or later:

• Dynamic file headers.
• Forwarding of structured data.
• Timezone transmission by the forwarder. Additionally, forwarders do not maintain the timezone transmission feature across intermediate forwarding tiers when those tiers consist of light or universal forwarders.

For app-specific compatibility restrictions, see the app documentation on Splunkbase.