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:

• Some buckets being deleted before they reach the desired time or size to become cold or frozen.
• The hot and warm buckets filling all space on the storage and preventing Splunk Enterprise from indexing more data.
• Some events not being archived correctly and are searchable when they shouldn't be.
• Poor searching or indexing performance.

To learn How Splunk Enterprise categorizes and manages buckets, see How the indexer stores indexes in the Managing Indexers and Clusters of Indexers manual.

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.