Splunk® Enterprise

Troubleshooting Manual

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Splunk Enterprise version 7.0 is no longer supported as of October 23, 2019. See the Splunk Software Support Policy for details. For information about upgrading to a supported version, see How to upgrade Splunk Enterprise.
This documentation does not apply to the most recent version of Splunk® Enterprise. For documentation on the most recent version, go to the latest release.
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What do I do with buckets?

Buckets are portions of Splunk indexes. This article points you to a few resources for troubleshooting problems with buckets.

Might I be having issues with bucket rotation?

An unsuitable bucket rotation and retention policy can lead to:

  • old events being deleted before they reach frozen buckets,
  • hot and warm buckets filling up, stopping Splunk,
  • old events not being archived correctly and thus still searchable when they shouldn't be, and
  • poor searching or indexing performance.

Here's a Community Wiki article about bucket rotation and retention with specific recommendations and examples.

Recover metadata for a corrupt Splunk index directory

Contact Splunk Support for direction before using this command.

The recover-metadata command recovers missing or corrupt metadata associated with any Splunk index directory, sometimes also referred to as a bucket.

If your Splunk instance will not start, a possible cause is that one or more of your index buckets is corrupt in some way. Contact Support; they will help you determine if this is indeed the case and if so, which bucket(s) are affected. Then, run this command:

$SPLUNK_HOME/bin/splunk cmd recover-metadata <full path to the exact index directory/bucket>

Splunk returns a success or failure message.

Recovering and rebuilding buckets

Managing Indexers and Clusters has a thorough explanation of buckets. See the Troubleshoot indexers and clusters of indexers chapter for help troubleshooting bucket problems, like crash recovery, rebuilding buckets, bucket replication issues, and configuration bundle issues.

Last modified on 15 June, 2020
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This documentation applies to the following versions of Splunk® Enterprise: 7.0.0, 7.0.1, 7.0.2, 7.0.3, 7.0.4, 7.0.5, 7.0.6, 7.0.7, 7.0.8, 7.0.9, 7.0.10, 7.0.11, 7.0.13


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