Splunk Enterprise and anti-virus products

Splunk Enterprise requires ample disk I/O bandwidth to perform indexing tasks. In particular, disk write operations are very intensive. These disk writes can clash with any product, such as anti-virus on-access scan software, that installs a driver that intermediates between Splunk Enterprise and the operating system.

When you run Splunk (Enterprise or forwarder) on a host that has an anti-virus product (such as McAfee VirusScan on Windows or Trend Micro ServerProtect on Linux) installed, Splunk strongly recommends that you exclude all Splunk processes as well as the Splunk installation directory from any kind of on-access scanning.

On Windows hosts, on-access scanners can significantly decrease performance. On *nix hosts, these scanners can use up file descriptors and render a host completely inaccessible.

Files and processes to exclude

The following table lists the Splunk platform directories and executables to exclude from anti-virus scanning.

Version:	Directories to exclude:	Processes to exclude:
Splunk Enterprise (Windows)	\Program Files\Splunk (%SPLUNK_HOME%) and all sub-directories \Program Files\Splunk\var\lib\splunk (%SPLUNK_DB%) and all sub-directories	splunk-admon.exe splunk-compresstool.exe splunk-MonitorNoHandle.exe splunk-netmon.exe splunk-optimize-lex.exe splunk-optimize.exe splunk-perfmon.exe splunk-regmon.exe splunk-winevtlog.exe splunk-winhostinfo.exe splunk-winprintmon.exe splunk-wmi.exe splunk.exe splunkd.exe splunkweb.exe
Splunk universal forwarder (Windows)	\Program Files\SplunkUniversalForwarder (%SPLUNK_HOME%) and all subdirectories	splunk-admon.exe splunk-compresstool.exe splunk-MonitorNoHandle.exe splunk-netmon.exe splunk-optimize-lex.exe splunk-optimize.exe splunk-perfmon.exe splunk-regmon.exe splunk-winevtlog.exe splunk-winhostinfo.exe splunk-winprintmon.exe splunk-wmi.exe splunk.exe splunkd.exe
Splunk Enterprise (*nix)	/opt/splunk ($SPLUNK_HOME) and all sub-directories /opt/splunk/var/lib/splunk ($SPLUNK_DB) and all sub-directories OS X: /Applications/splunkforwarder and all sub-directories	bloom btool btprobe bzip2 cherryd classify exporttool locktest locktool node python* splunk splunkd splunkmon tsidxprobe tsidxprobe_plo walklex
Splunk universal forwarder (*nix)	/opt/splunkforwarder ($SPLUNK_HOME) and all subdirectories OS X: /Applications/splunkforwarder	Same as Splunk Enterprise (*nix)

Other items to exclude

If you run a Splunk app or add-on on your Splunk Enterprise instance or forwarder, exclude any executables that might come with the app or add-on. An example is the Splunk Add-on for PowerShell - this modular input comes with an executable named powershell.exe that should also be excluded from anti-virus scans when it runs.

In general, any file associated with Splunk Enterprise that can be executed should be excluded from scanning. You might need to inspect additional files in apps or add-ons to determine whether or not they qualify.