Distributed Deployment Manual

About forwarding and receiving

You can forward data from one Splunk instance to another Splunk server or even to a non-Splunk system. The Splunk instance that performs the forwarding is typically a smaller footprint version of Splunk, called a forwarder.

A Splunk instance that receives data from one or more forwarders is called a receiver. The receiver is usually a Splunk indexer, but can also be another forwarder, as described here.

This diagram shows three forwarders sending data to a single Splunk receiver (an indexer), which then indexes the data and makes it available for searching:

Forwarders represent a much more robust solution for data forwarding than raw network feeds, with their capabilities for:

• Tagging of metadata (source, source type, and host)
• Configurable buffering
• Data compression
• SSL security
• Use of any available network ports

The forwarding and receiving capability makes possible all sorts of interesting Splunk topologies to handle functions like data consolidation, load balancing, and data routing. For more information on the types of deployment topologies that you can create with forwarders, see "Forwarder deployment topologies".

Splunk provides a number of types of forwarders to meet various needs. These are described in "Types of forwarders".