Pass the Splunk Enterprise Certified Architect SPLK-2002 Questions and answers with ExamsMirror

 The Monitoring Console is the Splunk tool that offers a health check for administrators to evaluate the health of their Splunk deployment. The Monitoring Console provides dashboards and alerts that show the status and performance of various Splunk components, such as indexers, search heads, forwarders, license usage, and search activity. The Monitoring Console can also run health checks on the deployment and identify any issues or recommendations. The btool is a command-line tool that shows the effective settings of the configuration files, but it does not offer a health check. The DiagGen is a tool that generates diagnostic snapshots of the Splunk environment, but it does not offer a health check. The SPL Clinic is a tool that analyzes and optimizes SPL queries, but it does not offer a health check. For more information, see About the Monitoring Console in the Splunk documentation.

The following statements describe a search head cluster captain:

Is the job scheduler for the entire search head cluster. The captain is responsible for scheduling and dispatching the searches that run on the search head cluster, as well as coordinating the search results from the search peers. The captain also ensures that the scheduled searches are balanced across the search head cluster members and that the search concurrency limits are enforced.

Replicates the search head cluster’s knowledge bundle to the search peers. The captain is responsible for creating and distributing the knowledge bundle to the search peers, which contains the knowledge objects that are required for the searches. The captain also ensures that the knowledge bundle is consistent and up-to-date across the search head cluster and the search peers. The following statements do not describe a search head cluster captain:

Manages alert action suppressions (throttling). Alert action suppressions are the settings that prevent an alert from triggering too frequently or too many times. These settings are managed by the search head that runs the alert, not by the captain. The captain does not have any special role in managing alert action suppressions.

Synchronizes the member list with the KV store primary. The member list is the list of search head cluster members that are active and available. The KV store primary is the search head cluster member that is responsible for replicating the KV store data to the other members. These roles are not related to the captain, and the captain does not synchronize them. The member list and the KV store primary are determined by the RAFT consensus algorithm, which is independent of the captain election. For more information, see [About the captain and the captain election] and [About KV store and search head clusters] in the Splunk documentation.

When adding or decommissioning a member from a Search Head Cluster (SHC), the proper order of operations is:

Delete Splunk Enterprise, if it exists.

Install and initialize the instance.

Join the SHC.

This order of operations ensures that the member has a clean and consistent Splunk installation before joining the SHC. Deleting Splunk Enterprise removes any existing configurations and data from the instance. Installing and initializing the instance sets up the Splunk software and the required roles and settings for the SHC. Joining the SHC adds the instance to the cluster and synchronizes the configurations and apps with the other members. The other order of operations are not correct, because they either skip a step or perform the steps in the wrong order.

According to the Splunk documentation1, one of the benefits of search head clustering is the automatic replication of user knowledge objects, such as dashboards, reports, alerts, and tags. This ensures that all cluster members have the same set of knowledge objects and can serve the same search results to the users. The other options are false because:

Allowing indexers to maintain multiple searchable copies of all data is a benefit of indexer clustering, not search head clustering2.

Input settings are not synchronized between search heads, as search head clusters do not collect data from inputs. Data collection is done by forwarders or independent search heads3.

Fewer network ports are not required to be opened between search heads, as search head clusters use several ports for communication and replication among the members4.

The __introspection log file contains data about the impact of the Splunk software on the host system, such as CPU, memory, disk, and network usage, as well as KV store performance1. This log file is monitored by default and the contents are sent to the _introspection index1. The other options are not related to the __introspection log file. File monitor input configurations are stored in inputs.conf2. File monitor checkpoint offset is stored in fishbucket3. User activities and knowledge objects are stored in the _audit and _internal indexes respectively4.

The site_mappings attribute should be added to the master node’s server.conf file when decommissioning a site in an indexer cluster. The site_mappings attribute is used to specify how the master node should reassign the buckets from the decommissioned site to the remaining sites. The site_mappings attribute is a comma-separated list of site pairs, where the first site is the decommissioned site and the second site is the destination site. For example, site_mappings = site1:site2,site3:site4 means that the buckets from site1 will be moved to site2, and the buckets from site3 will be moved to site4. The available_sites attribute is used to specify which sites are currently available in the cluster, and it is automatically updated by the master node. The site_search_factor and site_replication_factor attributes are used to specify the number of searchable and replicated copies of each bucket for each site, and they are not affected by the decommissioning process

When installing Enterprise Security on a Search Head Cluster (SHC), the following steps should be done: Install Enterprise Security on the deployer, and use the deployer to deploy Enterprise Security to the cluster members. Enterprise Security is a premium app that provides security analytics and monitoring capabilities for Splunk. Enterprise Security can be installed on a SHC by using the deployer, which is a standalone instance that distributes apps and other configurations to the SHC members. Enterprise Security should be installed on the deployer first, and then deployed to the cluster members using the splunk apply shcluster-bundle command. Enterprise Security should not be installed on a staging instance, because a staging instance is not part of the SHC deployment process. Enterprise Security configurations should not be copied to the deployer, because they are already included in the Enterprise Security app package.

According to the Splunk documentation1, the CHARSET setting in props.conf specifies the character set encoding of the source data. This setting has the least impact on indexing performance, as it only affects how Splunk interprets the bytes of the data, not how it processes or transforms the data. The other options are false because:

The SHOULD_LINEMERGE setting in props.conf determines whether Splunk breaks events based on timestamps or newlines. This setting has a significant impact on indexing performance, as it affects how Splunk parses the data and identifies the boundaries of the events2.

The TRUNCATE setting in props.conf specifies the maximum number of characters that Splunk indexes from a single line of a file. This setting has a moderate impact on indexing performance, as it affects how much data Splunk reads and writes to the index3.

The TIME_PREFIX setting in props.conf specifies the prefix that directly precedes the timestamp in the event data. This setting has a moderate impact on indexing performance, as it affects how Splunk extracts the timestamp and assigns it to the event

 The following is a good practice for a search head cluster deployer: The deployer must be used to distribute non-replicable configurations to search head cluster members. Non-replicable configurations are the configurations that are not replicated by the search factor, such as the apps and the server.conf settings. The deployer is the Splunk server role that distributes these configurations to the search head cluster members, ensuring that they have the same configuration. The deployer does not only distribute configurations to search head cluster members when they “phone home”, as this would cause configuration inconsistencies and delays. The deployer does not distribute configurations to search head cluster members to be valid configurations, as this implies that the configurations are invalid without the deployer. The deployer does not only distribute configurations to search head cluster members with splunk apply shcluster-bundle, as this would require manual intervention by the administrator. For more information, see Use the deployer to distribute apps and configuration updates in the Splunk documentation.

The captain is the search head cluster component that is responsible for pushing knowledge bundles to search peers, replicating configuration changes to search head cluster members, and scheduling jobs across the search head cluster. The captain is elected from among the search head cluster members and performs these tasks in addition to serving search requests. The master is the indexer cluster component that is responsible for managing the replication and availability of data across the peer nodes. The deployer is the standalone instance that is responsible for distributing apps and other configurations to the search head cluster members. The deployment server is the instance that is responsible for distributing apps and other configurations to the deployment clients, such as forwarders