Pass the Splunk Splunk Enterprise Certified Admin SPLK-1003 Questions and answers with CertsForce

In Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Universal Forwarder, data inputs are configured using stanzas in inputs.conf. Each stanza defines a listener for a particular input type (for example, TCP or UDP) and a specific port.

Splunk documentation states that a single TCP input stanza can receive data from multiple remote hosts sending to the same TCP port, and similarly, a single UDP input stanza can receive data from multiple devices sending to the same UDP port. Therefore, the number of sending devices does not determine the number of stanzas required; rather, the input protocol and port type do.

In this case:

All three TCP devices can send data to one TCP port (one stanza).

All four UDP devices can send data to one UDP port (one stanza).

Thus, the minimum number of input stanzas required is two — one for TCP and one for UDP.

Example configuration (inputs.conf):

# TCP input for three switches sending via TCP

[tcp://9997]

sourcetype = switch_logs

# UDP input for four switches sending via UDP

[udp://514]

sourcetype = switch_logs

This configuration ensures all seven devices’ logs are collected without creating individual stanzas for each device.

Reference (Splunk Documentation):

Splunk® Enterprise Admin Manual → Configure Data Inputs → “Listen for network data”

inputs.conf.spec and example → “You can configure a single TCP or UDP input to receive data from multiple remote hosts.”

Splunk Universal Forwarder Manual → Configure Forwarding Inputs → “Universal Forwarders can listen on a single TCP or UDP port for multiple remote data sources.”

To verify the integrity of a local bucket. The command ./splunk check-integrity -bucketPath [bucket path] [-verbose] is used to verify the integrity of a local bucket by comparing the hashes stored in the l1Hashes and l2Hash files with the actual data in the bucket1. This command can help detect any tampering or corruption of the data.

https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/8.0.4/Admin/Propsconf#props.conf.spec

https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/8.1.1/Admin/Propsconf

"* Reuse of the same field-extracting regular expression across multiple sources, source types, or hosts."https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/8.0.4/Admin/Propsconf#props.conf.spec

https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/8.2.2/Updating/Aboutdeploymentserver

"The deployment server is the tool for distributing configurations, apps, and content updates to groups of Splunk Enterprise instances."

A bucket is the object that stores events inside of an index. According to the Splunk documentation1, “An index is a collection of directories, also called buckets, that contain index files. Each bucket represents a specific time range.” A bucket can be in one of several states, such as hot, warm, cold, frozen, or thawed1. Buckets are managed by indexers or clusters of indexers1.

https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/8.1.3/Security/ConfigureLDAPwithSplunkWeb

"You can map either users or groups, but not both. If you are using groups, all users must be members of an appropriate group. Groups inherit capabilities form the highest level role they're a member of." "If your LDAP environment does not have group entries, you can treat each user as its own group."

The correct answer is D. No, because the event time is greater than the retention time.

According to the Splunk documentation1, the frozenTimePeriodInSecs setting in indexes.conf determines how long Splunk software retains indexed data before deleting it or archiving it to a remote storage. The default value is 188697600 seconds, which is equivalent to six years. The setting can be overridden on a per-index basis.

In this case, the cat_facts index has a frozenTimePeriodInSecs setting of 2630000 seconds, which is equivalent to about 30 days. This means that any event that is older than 30 days from the current time will be removed from the index and will not be searchable.

The event timestamp was 3739283 seconds ago, which is equivalent to about 43 days. This means that the event is older than the retention time of the cat_facts index and will not be searchable.

The other settings in the stanza, such as maxHotSpanSecs and maxTota1DataSizeMB, do not affect the retention time of the events. They only affect the size and duration of the buckets that store the events.

The Splunk indexing process consists of three main phases: Input, Parsing, and Indexing. Understanding these phases is crucial for configuring data inputs and managing data flow within Splunk.

Input Phase: Splunk receives data from various sources, such as files, network ports, or scripted inputs.

Parsing Phase: Splunk breaks the data into individual events, applies transformations, and extracts timestamps.

Indexing Phase: Splunk writes the parsed events to disk and creates indexes for efficient searching.

From the official Splunk documentation:

"The data pipeline consists of three main phases: input, parsing, and indexing."

— How the Splunk platform indexes data - Splunk Documentation

Therefore, the correct order of the indexing process is: Input phase → Parsing phase → Indexing phase.