Compatibility between forwarders and Splunk Enterprise indexers

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.

Determine forwarder-indexer compatibility

The following are the supported forwarder versions for Splunk Enterprise. This information is applicable to universal and heavy forwarders that are communicating directly to indexers and cluster peers, and includes forwarders deployed in an intermediate forwarding tier. If the forwarder version you want to use is not in this table, then there is no support for it. See Product Supported Version Timelines on splunk.com and Splunk Support Programs. As a best practice, forwarders should communicate with indexers that are the same or higher version.

This table applies to Splunk Enterprise only. Splunk Cloud Platform forwarder compatibility information is provided in Supported Forwarder Versions in the Splunk Cloud Platform Service Description manual.

• E - Events. This version of forwarder can send event data to the corresponding version of indexer.
• H - HTTPOUT. This version of forwarder can send event data from Splunk instance to Splunk instance (S2S) over Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS).
• M - Metrics. This version of forwarder can send both event data and metrics data to the corresponding version of indexer.
• 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.

Forwarder version	Splunk Enterprise indexer version
	8.1.x	8.2.x	9.0.x
7.x (P3 support only)	E, M	E, M	E, M
8.0.x (P3 support only)	E, M	E, M	E, M
8.1.x	E, M	E, H, M	E, H, M
8.2.x	E, M	E, H, M	E, H, M
9.0.x	E, M	E, H, M	E, H, M

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