Splunk® Enterprise

Managing Indexers and Clusters of Indexers

Splunk Enterprise version 8.1 will no longer be supported as of April 19, 2023. 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.

Configure the search head with the CLI

Read this first

Before reading this topic, see:

Enable a search head

The following example shows the basic settings that you typically configure when enabling a search head. The configuration attributes correspond to fields on the Enable clustering page of Splunk Web.

To enable an instance as a search head, set mode to "searchhead". You also need to specify the master_uri and the cluster-wide security key (secret):

splunk edit cluster-config -mode searchhead -master_uri https://10.160.31.200:8089 -secret your_key

splunk restart

The -secret flag modifies the pass4SymmKey setting in the [clustering] stanza of server.conf.

Edit the search head settings

You can also use the CLI to edit the configuration later.

Important: When you first enable a search head, you use the splunk edit cluster-config command. To change the search head configuration, you must instead use the splunk edit cluster-master command.

For example, to change the security key (secret), use this command:

splunk edit cluster-master https://10.160.31.200:8089  -secret newsecret123

Important: The splunk edit cluster-master command always takes the current manager node URI:port value as its initial parameter. For example, this command connects the search head to a different manager node by setting a new value for the -master_uri parameter, but it provides the value for the old manager node as its initial parameter:

splunk edit cluster-master https://10.160.31.200:8089  -master_uri https://10.160.31.55:8089

Refer to the CLI clustering help, along with the server.conf specification file, for the list of configurable settings.

Last modified on 20 April, 2021
Configure the search head with server.conf   Search across multiple indexer clusters

This documentation applies to the following versions of Splunk® Enterprise: 8.1.0, 8.1.1, 8.1.2, 8.1.3, 8.1.4, 8.1.5, 8.1.6, 8.1.7, 8.1.8, 8.1.9, 8.1.10, 8.1.11, 8.1.12, 8.1.13, 8.1.14


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