If you delete a user, the PRIVATE saved searches owned by the user will be deleted. If the user has SHARED any searches (or other knowledge objects), they will still exist.
The shared knowledge objects will still have the deleted user's name attached to them; they may be deleted by the Splunk admin. However, I don't think there is any mechanism for the Splunk admin to assign the saved searches to another user.
Would be handy if reassign was implemented; in 6.4 orphaned searches are brought to your attention, but the only solution to make it work again is clone to something renamed, remove the original search, and clone to the original name again (and remove the temp clone).
For those of you on *Nix machines would be able to do something like this:
cd $SPLUNK_HOME/etc
for x in find . -name 'local.meta'; do cp $x $x.old ; sed s/olduser/newuser/ < $x > $x.new ; mv -f $x.new $x ; done
This will make a backup of the local.meta, swap out the olduser for the newuser and copy it over the local.meta. All you should have to do is restart Splunk.
Brian
Although you could do this:
Determine the app that the savedsearch (or tag or eventtype etc) belongs to. Edit the file
$SPLUNK_HOME/etc/apps/[appname]/metadata/local.meta
Find the item(s) that need to be changed, and update the owner field.
This should change the owner. AFAIK, there is no way to do this from the GUI.
If you delete user, the saved search owned by the user will be deleted. Configuration owned by user is stored in $SPLUNK_HOME/etc/user directory. If you remove the user completely, those configuration will be also removed.
Only those searches that have Private
permissions; the ones with App
or Global
are located elsewhere and will not be deleted but will switch to ownership of nobody
.