Hi all,
Can Splunk forwarders be installed on Network devices such as Swithes,routers,Gateways,etc for data capture and analysis??
For best practices for network devices look at a recent blog post:
http://blogs.splunk.com/2013/05/13/network-inputs-best-practices/
Most of those devices do not let you install software on to them. Although they do support syslog to Splunk.
Are you looking to do a tcpdump/pcap traffic capture? You could set Splunk to listen to specific ports that you forward the traffic to.
Get data from TCP and UDP ports
This sounds a lot like this question.