A complication (and my guess as to what bit you) is that the hostname listed in the Deployment Monitor is the value of the HOSTNAME environment variable when you launch splunk.
So if you change the hostname, edit the inputs.conf and server.conf and remove the guid from etc/instance.cfg, and restart from the same session, likely your HOSTNAME environment variable will hold the old hostname.
This confused the hell out of me for a while, with it sometimes working and sometimes not.
But I verified: cleared the guid= setting, then did:
HOSTNAME=fred.flintstone.com splunk restart
Now fred.flintstone.com showed up in the Deployment Monitor, even though that appeared nowhere else but in the HOSTNAME environment variable.
So log out and log back in, or set your HOSTNAME variable environment manually, before restarting.
Full procedure:
Set the desired hostname (hostname myhost.example.com)
set host = in /etc/system/local/inputs.conf
set serverName = in /etc/system/local/server.conf
remove guid= in /etc/instance.cfg
ensure you have the correct HOSTNAME environment variable, fix if not, e.g.: export HOSTNAME="$(hostname)"
restart splunk
remove old bogus entry from the Deployment Monitor page
i hope that helps the next guy!
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