How Splunk apps affect Splunk Enterprise performance

A single Splunk Enterprise indexer can run multiple apps simultaneously. Splunk Enterprise includes several apps which it runs at the same time.

However, the more complex apps offer advanced views that require the use of summarizing and accelerating searches that run in the background. The more background processing an app needs, the more likely you must distribute the processing load across multiple machines.

Many apps require a distributed Splunk Enterprise deployment by design. Whether it is a case of universal forwarders fetching data and sending it to a single central instance, or many indexers and search heads connected together and serving up reports, dashboards, or alerts, Splunk apps often need more than one server to realize both maximum performance and potential in the enterprise.

How Splunk apps affect resource requirements

If you use a Splunk app or solution that gets knowledge by executing a large number of saved searches, then you can overwhelm a single-server Splunk Enterprise instance. Multiple searches quickly exhaust available CPU resources on an indexer. See Accommodate many simultaneous searches in this manual.

When you install an app or solution, read the system requirements outlined in that app or solution's documentation. If the information is not available, contact the authors of the app or solution to get information about what you need to run the app properly.