The correct answer is C and D. A heavy forwarder and an indexer are the Splunk components that can break a stream of syslog inputs into individual events.
A universal forwarder is a lightweight agent that can forward data to a Splunk deployment, but it does not perform any parsing or indexing on the data. A search head is a Splunk component that handles search requests and distributes them to indexers, but it does not process incoming data.
A heavy forwarder is a Splunk component that can perform parsing, filtering, routing, and aggregation on the data before forwarding it to indexers or other destinations. A heavy forwarder can break a stream of syslog inputs into individual events based on the line breaker and should linemerge settings in the inputs.conf file1.
An indexer is a Splunk component that stores and indexes data, making it searchable. An indexer can also break a stream of syslog inputs into individual events based on the props.conf file settings, such as TIME_FORMAT, MAX_TIMESTAMP_LOOKAHEAD, and line_breaker2.
A Splunk component is a software process that performs a specific function in a Splunk deployment, such as data collection, data processing, data storage, data search, or data visualization.
Syslog is a standard protocol for logging messages from network devices, such as routers, switches, firewalls, or servers. Syslog messages are typically sent over UDP or TCP to a central syslog server or a Splunk instance.
Breaking a stream of syslog inputs into individual events means separating the data into discrete records that can be indexed and searched by Splunk. Each event should have a timestamp, a host, a source, and a sourcetype, which are the default fields that Splunk assigns to the data.
References:
1: Configure inputs using Splunk Connect for Syslog - Splunk Documentation
2: inputs.conf - Splunk Documentation
3: How to configure props.conf for proper line breaking … - Splunk Community
4: Reliable syslog/tcp input – splunk bundle style | Splunk
5: Configure inputs using Splunk Connect for Syslog - Splunk Documentation
6: About configuration files - Splunk Documentation
[7]: Configure your OSSEC server to send data to the Splunk Add-on for OSSEC - Splunk Documentation
[8]: Splunk components - Splunk Documentation
[9]: Syslog - Wikipedia
[10]: About default fields - Splunk Documentation
