Install the universal forwarder on Solaris

Important: Splunk does not offer an installation package for Splunk Enterprise on Solaris. There is a universal forwarder installation package for Solaris versions 10 and 11 on both 64-bit x86 and SPARC architectures.

To use Splunk Enterprise on Solaris, you must download an older version of the Splunk software. See the previous releases page.

Basic installation

The Splunk universal forwarder for Solaris is available as a tar file.

tar file install

The tar file is a manual form of installation. When you install the universal forwarder with a tar file:

• Some non-GNU versions of tar might not have the -C argument available. In this case, if you want to install in /opt/splunkforwarder, either cd to /opt or place the tar file in /opt before running the tar command. This method will work for any accessible directory on your machine's filesystem.
• If the gzip binary is not present on your system, you can use the uncompress command instead.
• Splunk software does not create the splunk user automatically. If you want it to run as a specific user, you must create the user manually before installing.

To install the universal forwarder on a Solaris system, expand the tar file into an appropriate directory using the tar command:

tar xvzf splunkforwarder.tar.Z

The default install directory is splunk in the current working directory. To install into /opt/splunk, use the following command:

tar xvzf splunkforwarder.tar.Z -C /opt

Next steps

Now that you have installed the universal forwarder:

• Start it, if it has not started already.
• Configure it to start at boot time. See Configure Splunk software to start at boot time.