SPLK-2002 Exam Dumps - Splunk Enterprise Certified Architect

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation (From Splunk Enterprise Documentation)Splunk’s documentation on summary indexing and data-model acceleration clarifies that summary data is stored as additional indexed data on the indexers. Summary indexing produces new events—aggregations, rollups, scheduled search outputs—and stores them in summary indexes. Splunk explains that these summaries accumulate over time and require additional bucket storage, retention considerations, and sizing adjustments.

The documentation for accelerated data models further confirms that acceleration summaries are stored alongside raw data on indexers, increasing disk usage proportional to the acceleration workload. This makes summary indexing the only listed feature that strictly increases indexer storage demand.

In contrast, Search Head Clustering replicates configuration and knowledge objects across search heads—not on indexers. Indexer Discovery affects forwarder behavior, not storage. Indexer Acknowledgement controls data-delivery guarantees but does not create extra indexed content.

Therefore, only Index Summarization (summary indexing) directly increases indexer storage requirements.

When Splunk indexes data in a non-clustered environment, it creates index and .tsidx files by default. The index files contain the raw data that Splunk has ingested, compressed and encrypted. The .tsidx files contain the time-series index that maps the timestamps and event IDs of the raw data. The rawdata and index files are not the correct terms for the files that Splunk creates. The compressed and .tsidx files are partially correct, but compressed is not the proper name for the index files. The compressed and meta data files are also partially correct, but meta data is not the proper name for the .tsidx files.

To ensure that high-velocity sources will not have forwarding delays to the indexers, the default limit for maxKBps in limits.conf should be increased. This parameter controls the maximum bandwidth that a forwarder can use to send data to the indexers. By default, it is set to 256 KBps, which may not be sufficient for high-volume data sources. Increasing this limit can reduce the forwarding latency and improve the performance of the forwarders. However, this should be done with caution, as it may affect the network bandwidth and the indexer load. Option B is the correct answer. Option A is incorrect because the sessionTimeout parameter in server.conf controls the duration of a TCP connection between a forwarder and an indexer, not the bandwidth limit. Option C is incorrect because the forceTimebasedAutoLB parameter in outputs.conf controls the frequency of load balancing among the indexers, not the bandwidth limit. Option D is incorrect because the phoneHomelntervallnSecs parameter in deploymentclient.conf controls the interval at which a forwarder contacts the deployment server, not the bandwidth limit12

1: https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/9.1.2/Admin/Limitsconf#limits.conf.spec 2: https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/9.1.2/Forwarding/Routeandfilterdatad#Set_the_maximum_bandwidth_usage_for_a_forwarder

 The parallelIngestionPipelines setting can be adjusted on the indexers and forwarders to improve Splunk performance. The parallelIngestionPipelines setting determines how many concurrent data pipelines are used to process the incoming data. Increasing the parallelIngestionPipelines setting can improve the data ingestion and indexing throughput, especially for high-volume data sources. The parallelIngestionPipelines setting can be adjusted on the indexers and forwarders by editing the limits.conf file. The parallelIngestionPipelines setting cannot be adjusted on the search head or the cluster master, because they are not involved in the data ingestion and indexing process.

According to the Splunk SmartStore Architecture Guide, the primary benefit of SmartStore is the separation of storage from compute resources within an indexer cluster. SmartStore enables Splunk to decouple indexer storage (data at rest) from the compute layer (indexers that perform searches and indexing).

With SmartStore, active (hot/warm) data remains on local disk for fast access, while older, less frequently searched (remote) data is stored in an external object storage system such as Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, or on-premises S3-compatible storage. This separation reduces the storage footprint on indexers, allowing organizations to scale compute and storage independently.

This architecture improves cost efficiency and scalability by:

Lowering on-premises storage costs using object storage for retention.

Enabling dynamic scaling of indexers without impacting total data availability.

Reducing replication overhead since SmartStore manages data objects efficiently.

SmartStore does not affect replication or search factors (Option A), does not handle Knowledge Object replication (Option C), and the Cluster Manager is still required (Option D) to coordinate cluster activities.

References (Splunk Enterprise Documentation):

• SmartStore Overview and Architecture Guide

• SmartStore Deployment and Configuration Manual

• Managing Storage and Compute Independence in Indexer Clusters

• Splunk Enterprise Capacity Planning – SmartStore Sizing Guidelines

The correct answer is A. Change frozenTimePeriodInSecs to a larger value. This is a possible solution to reduce the need to thaw buckets, as it increases the time period before a bucket is frozen and removed from the index1. The frozenTimePeriodInSecs attribute specifies the maximum age, in seconds, of the data that the index can contain1. By setting it to a larger value, the Splunk administrator can keep the data in the index for a longer time, and avoid having to thaw the buckets frequently. The other options are not effective solutions to reduce the need to thaw buckets. Option B, changing maxTotalDataSizeMB to a smaller value, would actually increase the need to thaw buckets, as it decreases the maximum size, in megabytes, of an index2. This means that the index would reach its size limit faster, and more buckets would be frozen and removed. Option C, changing maxHotSpanSecs to a larger value, would not affect the need to thaw buckets, as it only changes the maximum lifetime, in seconds, of a hot bucket3. This means that the hot bucket would stay hot for a longer time, but it would not prevent the bucket from being frozen eventually. Option D, changing coldToFrozenDir to a different location, would not reduce the need to thaw buckets, as it only changes the destination directory for the frozen buckets4. This means that the buckets would still be frozen and removed from the index, but they would be stored in a different location. Therefore, option A is the correct answer, and options B, C, and D are incorrect.

1: Set a retirement and archiving policy 2: Configure index size 3: Bucket rotation and retention 4: Archive indexed data

The Monitoring Console (MC) is the Splunk Enterprise monitoring tool that lets you view detailed topology and performance information about your Splunk Enterprise deployment1. The MC can be installed on any Splunk Enterprise instance that can access the data from all the instances in the deployment2. However, following the Splunk recommendations, the MC should be installed on the search head cluster deployer, which is a dedicated instance that manages the configuration bundle for the search head cluster members3. This way, the MC can monitor the search head cluster as well as the indexer cluster and the forwarders, without affecting the performance or availability of the other instances4. The other options are not recommended because they either introduce additional load on the existing instances (such as A and D) or do not have access to the data from the search head cluster (such as B).

1: About the Monitoring Console - Splunk Documentation 2: Add Splunk Enterprise instances to the Monitoring Console 3: Configure the deployer - Splunk Documentation 4: [Monitoring Console setup and use - Splunk Documentation]

As a best practice, the internal licensing logs should be stored on the license server. The license server is a Splunk instance that manages the distribution and enforcement of licenses in a Splunk deployment. The license server generates internal licensing logs that contain information about the license usage, violations, warnings, and pools. The internal licensing logs should be stored on the license server itself, because they are relevant to the license server’s role and function. Storing the internal licensing logs on the license server also simplifies the license monitoring and troubleshooting process. The internal licensing logs should not be stored on the indexing layer, the deployment layer, or the search head layer, because they are not related to the roles and functions of these layers. Storing the internal licensing logs on these layers would also increase the network traffic and disk space consumption