About forwarding and receiving

You can forward data from one Splunk Enterprise instance to another Splunk Enterprise instance or even to a non-Splunk system. The Splunk instance that performs the forwarding is called a forwarder.

There are several types of forwarders. See Types of forwarders to learn about each of them.

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

Installation instructions

If you already know about forwarders and want the instructions on how to install them, see the following:

• Set up forwarding and receiving: heavy or light forwarders
• Set up the universal forwarder

Sample forwarding layout

This diagram shows three forwarders that send data to a single 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 topologies. You can build environments to handle functions like data consolidation, load balancing, and data routing.

Learn more about forwarding and receiving

• To learn more about the fundamentals of Splunk Enterprise distributed deployment, see the Distributed Deployment Manual.
• For more information on the types of deployment topologies that you can create with forwarders, see Forwarder deployment topologies in this manual.
• To learn about what intermediate forwarding is, see Intermediate forwarding in this manual.
• To learn about the different types of forwarders available, see Types of forwarders.
• To learn about universal forwarders, see the Universal Forwarder manual.