Splunk Enterprise Certified Admin Interview Questions
Preparing for an interview is as important as preparing for an exam. Therefore, preparing for an interview takes a lot more practice, time, effort, and confidence to ace any exam. The first impression is the last impression so you have to give your best. Therefore, to help our candidates to prepare well for the Splunk Enterprise Certified Admin interview, we have tried our best to present you with the best and expert-revised interview questions. Moreover, we have covered all Splunk Enterprise Certified Admin Interview Questions from basic to intermediate and to advance level. Therefore, we highly recommend the aspirants prepare with the best and achieve the best.
Given Below are some top Splunk Enterprise Certified Admin Interview Questions. This would help the candidates get an idea about what types and patterns they should expect.
1. What is a search head is a Splunk Enterprise?
A search head is a Splunk Enterprise instance that distributes searches to indexers (referred to as “search peers” in this context). Search heads can be either dedicated or not, depending on whether they also perform indexing. Dedicated search heads don’t have any indexes of their own, other than the usual internal indexes. Instead, they consolidate and display results that originate from remote search peers.
2. What is a Forwarder?
Forwarders are Splunk instances that forward data to remote indexers for data processing and storage. In most cases, they do not index data themselves.
3. Explain Index cluster and Index replication.
An indexer cluster is a group of indexers configured to replicate each others’ data so that the system keeps multiple copies of all data. This process is known as index replication. By maintaining multiple, identical copies of data, indexer clusters prevent data loss while promoting data availability for searching.
4. What is a Deployment Server?
The deployment server is a tool for distributing configurations, apps, and content updates to groups of Splunk Enterprise instances. You can use it to distribute updates to most types of Splunk components: forwarders, non-clustered indexers, and non-clustered search heads.
5. What are the benefits of Splunk Enterprise license?
- The Enterprise license gives access to all Splunk Enterprise features.
- The Enterprise license is for single-instance and distributed installations.
- The Enterprise licenses can be stacked, and assigned to pools.
- The Enterprise license can be purchased by daily indexing volume.
- The Enterprise license does not enforce license violations.
6. For whom are Sales Trial licenses meant for?
A sales trial license is for customers who cannot use the Enterprise Trial license due to the time or indexing volume limits.
7. What is a Forwarder license?
The Forwarder license is an embedded license within Splunk Enterprise. It is designed to allow unlimited forwarding, along with a small subset of Splunk Enterprise features needed for configuration management, authentication, and sending data.
8. When is a Heavy Forwarder Used?
A heavy forwarder is often used to perform more complex functions than the Forwarder license allows. Access to features such as advanced authentication, alerting, distributed search, KVStore, and indexing require an Enterprise license. You can configure the heavy forwarder as a license slave to the license master to gain access to those features.
9. What happens during a license violation period?
During a license violation period:
- Splunk Enterprise continues to index your data.
- Using search is blocked while you are in violation. This restriction includes scheduled reports and alerts.
- Searching the internal indexes is not blocked. You can use the monitoring console or run searches against the _internal index to diagnose the licensing problem.
10. What conditions can generate license warnings?
These are some of the conditions that generate a license warning:
- When a licensed pool has reached its daily license volume limit.
- When a license stack has reached its daily license volume limit.
- When a licensed slave is unable to communicate with the licensed master
11. What is a default directory?
The default directory contains preconfigured versions of the configuration files with default settings.
12. What are configuration files and where are they stored?
It is a file that contains Splunk Enterprise configuration information. Configuration files are stored in:
- Default files
- Editable local files
- App files
13. What happens when you incorporate changes in your configuration files?
When incorporating changes, Splunk software does the following to your configuration files:
- It merges the settings from all copies of the file, using a location-based prioritization scheme.
- When different copies have conflicting attribute values (that is, when they set the same attribute to different values), it uses the value from the file with the highest priority.
- It determines the priority of configuration files by their location in the directory structure, according to the rules described in this topic.
14. What is the use of btool command?
The conf files can be placed in many different folders under the Splunk software installation. The btool command simulates the merging process using the on-disk conf files and creates a report showing the merged settings. The conf files can be placed in many different folders under the Splunk software installation. The btool command simulates the merging process using the on-disk conf files and creates a report showing the merged settings.
15. What is Splunk Enterprise platform instrumentation?
Splunk Enterprise platform instrumentation refers to data that Splunk Enterprise logs and uses to populate the _introspection index. It generates data about your Splunk instance and environment and writes that data to log files to aid in reporting on system resource utilization and troubleshooting problems with your Splunk Enterprise deployment
16. What do introspection files contain?
The introspection files contain data about:
- Operating system resource usage for Splunk Enterprise processes, broken down by the process.
- Operating system resource usage for the entire host.
- Disk object data.
- KV store performance data.
17. What is an Indexer?
An indexer is a Splunk Enterprise instance that indexes data. For small deployments, a single instance might perform other Splunk Enterprise functions as well, such as data input and search management. In a larger, distributed deployment, however, the functions of data input and search management are allocated to other Splunk Enterprise components.
18. What are the two types of Index files?
A Splunk Enterprise index contains a variety of files. These files fall into two main categories:
- The raw data in compressed form (raw data)
- Indexes that point to the raw data (index files, also referred to as tsidx files), plus some metadata files
19. How does Splunk Enterprise enhances its data by event processing?
Splunk Enterprise enhances the data in various ways, including by:
- Separating the datastream into individual, searchable events.
- Creating or identifying timestamps.
- Extracting fields such as host, source, and sourcetype.
- Performing user-defined actions on the incoming data, such as identifying custom fields, masking sensitive data, writing new or modified keys, applying breaking rules for multi-line events, filtering unwanted events, and routing events to specified indexes or servers.
20. What are Buckets?
Splunk Enterprise stores indexed data in buckets, which are directories containing both the data and index files into the data. An index typically consists of many buckets, organized by age of the data.
21. How many types of files are their in Buckets?
There are two key types of files in a bucket:
The processed external data in compressed form (raw data)
Indexes that point to the rawdata (index files, also referred to as tsidx files)
22. How does Splunk Enterprise data integrity work?
When you enable data integrity control, Splunk Enterprise computes hashes on every slice of newly indexed raw data and writes it to a l1Hashes file. When the bucket rolls from hot to warm, Splunk Enterprise computes a hash on the contents of the l1Hashes and stores the computed hash in l2Hash. Both hash files are stored in the rawdata directory for that bucket.
23. What is a fishbucket?
Fishbucket is a subdirectory where Splunk software tracks how far into a file indexing has progressed, to enable the software to detect when data has been added to the file and resume indexing. The fishbucket subdirectory contains seek pointers and CRCs for indexed files.
24. How can you configure the LDAP authentication scheme with Splunk Web?
here are three main steps to configure the LDAP authentication scheme with Splunk Web:
- Create an LDAP strategy.
- Map LDAP groups to Splunk roles.
- If you have multiple LDAP servers, specify their connection order
25. What is multifactor authentication?
Multifactor authentication allows you to configure a primary and secondary login for your Splunk Enterprise users. You can configure multifactor authentication using RSA Authentication Manager for Splunk Web, REST endpoints, and CLI. Multifactor authentication secures the Splunk Enterprise web (8000) and management (8089) ports.
26. Name the sources that can work on multifactor authentication?
Multifactor authentication works with the following sources of authentication:
- Native authentication
- LDAP
- Scripted authentication
27. What are Configuration files?
Configuration files are text files that the universal forwarder reads when it starts up or when you reload a configuration. Forwarders must read configuration files to know where to get and send data. These files give you full access to the forwarder feature set, but editing configuration files can be difficult or mistake-prone at times.
28. What are Search Head Clusters?
Search head clusters are groups of search heads that coordinate their activities. It is a group of Splunk Enterprise search heads that serves as a central resource for searching
29. What are Search Peers?
Search Peers are the indexers that cluster members run their searches across. The search peers can be either independent indexers or nodes in an indexer cluster
30. What is a Deployment Client?
A deployment client is a Splunk instance remotely configured by a deployment server. Deployment clients can be universal forwarders, heavy forwarders, indexers, or search heads. Each deployment client belongs to one or more server classes.
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