New Release SPLK-2002 Splunk Enterprise Certified Architect Questions

According to Splunk’s Enterprise Security (ES) Installation and Sizing Guide, the majority of processing and computational load generated by the Splunk App for Enterprise Security is concentrated on the Search Head(s).

This is because Splunk ES is built around a search-driven correlation model — it continuously runs scheduled correlation searches, data model accelerations, and notables generation jobs. These operations rely on the search head tier’s CPU, memory, and I/O resources rather than on indexers. ES also performs extensive data model summarization, CIM normalization, and real-time alerting, all of which are search-intensive operations.

While indexers handle data ingestion and indexing, they are not heavily affected by ES beyond normal search request processing. The Cluster Manager only coordinates replication and plays no role in search execution, and Heavy Forwarders serve as data collection or parsing points with minimal analytical load.

Splunk officially recommends deploying ES on a dedicated Search Head Cluster (SHC) to isolate its high CPU and memory demands from other workloads. For large-scale environments, horizontal scaling via SHC ensures consistent performance and stability.

References (Splunk Enterprise Documentation):

• Splunk Enterprise Security Installation and Configuration Guide

• Search Head Sizing for Splunk Enterprise Security

• Enterprise Security Overview – Workload Distribution and Performance Impact

• Splunk Architecture and Capacity Planning for ES Deployments

When adding or decommissioning a member from a Search Head Cluster (SHC), the proper order of operations is:

Delete Splunk Enterprise, if it exists.

Install and initialize the instance.

Join the SHC.

This order of operations ensures that the member has a clean and consistent Splunk installation before joining the SHC. Deleting Splunk Enterprise removes any existing configurations and data from the instance. Installing and initializing the instance sets up the Splunk software and the required roles and settings for the SHC. Joining the SHC adds the instance to the cluster and synchronizes the configurations and apps with the other members. The other order of operations are not correct, because they either skip a step or perform the steps in the wrong order.

 Changing the limits.conf value for max_searches_per_cpu to a higher value is the best option to increase scheduled search capacity on the search head cluster when a large number of searches are skipped across time. This value determines how many concurrent scheduled searches can run on each CPU core of the search head. Increasing this value will allow more scheduled searches to run at the same time, which will reduce the number of skipped searches. Creating a job server on the cluster, running the server.conf captain_is_adhoc_searchhead = true command, or adding another search head to the cluster are not the best options to increase scheduled search capacity on the search head cluster. For more information, see [Configure limits.conf] in the Splunk documentation.

 Splunk internal logs are stored in the SPLUNK_HOME/var/log/splunk directory by default. The default log size for Splunk internal logs is 25 MB, which means that when a log file reaches 25 MB, Splunk rolls it to a backup file and creates a new log file. The default number of backup files is 5, which means that Splunk keeps up to 5 backup files for each log file