Splunk® Enterprise

Managing Indexers and Clusters of Indexers

Splunk Enterprise version 7.2 is no longer supported as of April 30, 2021. 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.

Master configuration overview

You initially configure the master when you enable it, as described in "Enable the master node". This is usually all the configuration the master needs.

Change the configuration

If you need to edit the configuration, you have these choices:

After you change the master configuration, you must restart the master for the changes to take effect.

Important: The master has the sole function of managing the other cluster nodes. Do not use it to index external data or to search the cluster.

Changes that require caution

Be careful when making changes to these settings:

  • Replication factor and search factor. It is inadvisable to increase either of these settings after your indexer cluster contains significant amounts of data. This will kick off a great deal of bucket activity, affecting the cluster's performance adversely while bucket copies are being created or made searchable.
  • Heartbeat timeout. Do not change the heartbeat_timeout attribute from its default value of 60 (seconds) unless instructed to do so by Splunk Support. In particular, do not decrease it. This can overload the peers.

Configure a stand-by master

To prepare for master node failure, configure a stand-by master that can take over if the current master goes down. See "Replace the master node on the indexer cluster".

Configure a multisite master

A multisite master has a number of configuration differences and additions, compared to a basic, single-site cluster. See "Configure multisite indexer clusters with server.conf".

Last modified on 15 September, 2020
Configure and manage the indexer cluster with the CLI   Configure the master with the dashboard

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, 7.1.0, 7.1.1, 7.1.2, 7.1.3, 7.1.4, 7.1.5, 7.1.6, 7.1.7, 7.1.8, 7.1.9, 7.1.10, 7.2.0, 7.2.1, 7.2.2, 7.2.3, 7.2.4, 7.2.5, 7.2.6, 7.2.7, 7.2.8, 7.2.9, 7.2.10, 7.3.0, 7.3.1, 7.3.2, 7.3.3, 7.3.4, 7.3.5, 7.3.6, 7.3.7, 7.3.8, 7.3.9, 8.0.0, 8.0.1, 8.0.2, 8.0.3, 8.0.4, 8.0.5, 8.0.6, 8.0.7, 8.0.8, 8.0.9, 8.0.10

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