Getting Data In

Does data indexed and forwarded from a heavy forwarder to indexer would charge twice?

jitsinha
Path Finder

Is changing indexAndForward=true at heavy forwarder and forwarding to an indexer will charge twice?

1 Solution

acharlieh
Influencer

While ideally, you should be only charged once for your ingestion of X bytes of usable data within your organization, the mechanism for counting usage isn't that smart. Each indexer counts and reports its own usage independently to the license master, so if you fork data to multiple clusters, or use indexAndForward with a HF (thus the HF is acting as an indexer itself), you could wind up with double counting.

(There are use cases where indexAndForward is used on indexers to send datta across organizational boundaries, in which case the two independent organizations are each happening to ingest the same number of bytes of usable data from source systems for their own purposes, and thus should count against each organization's own license. Furthermore sending cooked data doesn't preclude uncooking and transforming it before it lands at the destination organization's indexers)

Now if you have a particular use case where you want to use indexAndForward within your organization, I would talk over the options with your Account Rep / Sales Engineer. Depending on what you're looking to do and why, there may be some different options they would propose to manage the counting of license mechanism versus the compliance with the license terms.

View solution in original post

acharlieh
Influencer

While ideally, you should be only charged once for your ingestion of X bytes of usable data within your organization, the mechanism for counting usage isn't that smart. Each indexer counts and reports its own usage independently to the license master, so if you fork data to multiple clusters, or use indexAndForward with a HF (thus the HF is acting as an indexer itself), you could wind up with double counting.

(There are use cases where indexAndForward is used on indexers to send datta across organizational boundaries, in which case the two independent organizations are each happening to ingest the same number of bytes of usable data from source systems for their own purposes, and thus should count against each organization's own license. Furthermore sending cooked data doesn't preclude uncooking and transforming it before it lands at the destination organization's indexers)

Now if you have a particular use case where you want to use indexAndForward within your organization, I would talk over the options with your Account Rep / Sales Engineer. Depending on what you're looking to do and why, there may be some different options they would propose to manage the counting of license mechanism versus the compliance with the license terms.

jkat54
SplunkTrust
SplunkTrust

No, those will be "cooked" events at that point and will not cause additional license usage.

Same goes for summary indexing.

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