SPLK-2002 Premium Exam Questions

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.

A search head cluster is a group of Splunk Enterprise search heads that share configurations, job scheduling, and search artifacts1. The deployer is a Splunk Enterprise instance that distributes apps and other configurations to the cluster members1. The local folder of each Splunk app contains the custom configurations that override the default settings2. The default folder of each Splunk app contains the default configurations that are provided by the app2.

By default, when the deployer pushes an app to the search head cluster, it merges the local folder of the app into the default folder and deploys the merged folder to the search heads3. This means that the custom configurations in the local folder will take precedence over the default settings in the default folder. However, this also means that the local folder of the app on the search heads will be empty, unless the app is modified through the search head UI3.

Option B is the correct answer because it reflects the default behavior of the deployer when pushing apps to the search head cluster. Option A is incorrect because the local folder is not copied to the local folder on the search heads, but merged into the default folder. Option C is incorrect because all the .conf files in the local folder are deployed to the search heads, not only certain ones. Option D is incorrect because the local folder is not ignored, but merged into the default folder.

Splunk Enterprise officially requires a minimum of three search heads and one deployer for a supported Search Head Cluster (SHC) configuration. This ensures both high availability and data consistency within the cluster.

The Splunk documentation explains that a search head cluster uses RAFT-based consensus to elect a captain responsible for managing configuration replication, scheduling, and user workload distribution. The RAFT protocol requires a quorum of members to maintain consistency. In practical terms, this means a minimum of three members (search heads) to achieve fault tolerance — allowing one member to fail while maintaining operational stability.

The deployer is a separate Splunk instance responsible for distributing configuration bundles (apps, settings, and user configurations) to all members of the search head cluster. The deployer is not part of the SHC itself but is mandatory for its proper management.

Running with fewer than three search heads or replacing the deployer with a Deployment Server (as in Options B, C, or D) is unsupported and violates Splunk best practices for SHC resiliency and management.

References (Splunk Enterprise Documentation):

• Search Head Clustering Overview – Minimum Supported Architecture

• Deploy and Configure the Deployer for a Search Head Cluster

• High Availability and Fault Tolerance with RAFT in SHC

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]