SPLK-2002 Exam Dumps : Splunk Enterprise Certified Architect

Splunk Enterprise documentation clearly states that the best method to secure log traffic between Universal Forwarders (UFs) and Indexers is to implement Transport Layer Security (TLS) using signed SSL certificates. When Universal Forwarders send data to Indexers, this communication can be encrypted using SSL/TLS to prevent eavesdropping, data tampering, or interception while in transit.

Splunk provides default self-signed certificates out of the box, but these are only for testing or lab environments and should not be used in production. Production-grade security requires custom, signed SSL certificates — either from an internal Certificate Authority (CA) or a trusted public CA. These certificates validate both the sender (forwarder) and receiver (indexer), ensuring data integrity and authenticity.

In practice, this involves:

Generating or obtaining CA-signed certificates.

Configuring the forwarder’s outputs.conf to use SSL encryption (sslCertPath, sslPassword, and sslRootCAPath).

Configuring the indexer’s inputs.conf and server.conf to require and validate client certificates.

This configuration ensures end-to-end encryption for all log data transmitted from forwarders to indexers.

Routing traffic through a WAF (Option C) does not provide end-to-end encryption for Splunk’s internal communication, and securing search head–to–indexer communication (Option D) is unrelated to forwarder data flow.

References (Splunk Enterprise Documentation):

• Securing Splunk Enterprise: Encrypting Data in Transit Using SSL/TLS

• Configure Forwarder-to-Indexer Encryption

• Server and Forwarder Authentication with Signed Certificates

• Best Practices for Forwarder Management and Security Configuration

 In a distributed environment, knowledge object bundles are replicated from the search head to the SPLUNK_HOME/var/run/searchpeers directory on the search peer(s). A knowledge object bundle is a compressed file that contains the knowledge objects, such as fields, lookups, macros, and tags, that are required for a search. A search peer is a Splunk instance that provides data to a search head in a distributed search. A search head is a Splunk instance that coordinates and executes a search across multiple search peers. When a search head initiates a search, it creates a knowledge object bundle and replicates it to the search peers that are involved in the search. The search peers store the knowledge object bundle in the SPLUNK_HOME/var/run/searchpeers directory, which is a temporary directory that is cleared when the Splunk service restarts. The search peers use the knowledge object bundle to apply the knowledge objects to the data and return the results to the search head. The SPLUNK_HOME/var/lib/searchpeers, SPLUNK_HOME/var/log/searchpeers, and SPLUNK_HOME/var/spool/searchpeers directories are not the locations where the knowledge object bundles are replicated, because they do not exist in the Splunk file system

Of the following types of files within an index bucket, the rawdata file type may consume the most disk. The rawdata file type contains the compressed and encrypted raw data that Splunk has ingested. The rawdata file type is usually the largest file type in a bucket, because it stores the original data without any filtering or extraction. The bloom filter file type contains a probabilistic data structure that is used to determine if a bucket contains events that match a given search. The bloom filter file type is usually very small, because it only stores a bit array of hashes. The metadata (.data) file type contains information about the bucket properties, such as the earliest and latest event timestamps, the number of events, and the size of the bucket. The metadata file type is also usually very small, because it only stores a few lines of text. The inverted index (.tsidx) file type contains the time-series index that maps the timestamps and event IDs of the raw data. The inverted index file type can vary in size depending on the number and frequency of events, but it is usually smaller than the rawdata file type