Which of the following items might be the cause of this issue?

A Splunk architect has inherited the Splunk deployment at Buttercup Games and end users are complaining that the events are inconsistently formatted for a web source. Further investigation reveals that not all weblogs flow through the same infrastructure: some of the data goes through heavy forwarders and some of the forwarders are managed by another department.

Which of the following items might be the cause of this issue?
A . The search head may have different configurations than the indexers.
B . The data inputs are not properly configured across all the forwarders.
C . The indexers may have different configurations than the heavy forwarders.
D . The forwarders managed by the other department are an older version than the rest.

View Answer

Answer: C

Explanation:

The indexers may have different configurations than the heavy forwarders, which might cause the issue of inconsistently formatted events for a web sourcetype. The heavy forwarders perform parsing and indexing on the data before sending it to the indexers. If the indexers have different configurations than the heavy forwarders, such as different props.conf or transforms.conf settings, the data may be parsed or indexed differently on the indexers, resulting in inconsistent events. The search head configurations do not affect the event formatting, as the search head does not parse or index the data. The data inputs configurations on the forwarders do not affect the event formatting, as the data inputs only determine what data to collect and how to monitor it. The forwarder version does not affect the event formatting, as long as the forwarder is compatible with the indexer. For more information, see [Heavy forwarder versus indexer] and [Configure event processing] in the Splunk documentation.