Skip to main content
 
 
Splunk Lantern

Planning for infrastructure and resource scalability

 

To scale your Splunk environment while maintaining optimal efficiency and user satisfaction, you need a strategic approach. Your approach should include capacity planning, a flexible architecture that accommodates additional components, load balancing to prevent performance bottlenecks, and leveraging other features of the Splunk platform to help you optimize indexes and data. The strategies provided in this pathway will help you accomplish these goals. You can work through them sequentially or in any order that suits your current level of progress in scalability.

This article is part of the Improve Performance Outcome. For additional pathways to help you succeed with this outcome, click here to see the Improve Performance overview.

Assessing capacity needs

Capacity planning is the process of determining the right amount of computing resources, storage, and infrastructure needed to support the workloads in your Splunk deployment. By carefully analyzing current and projected data volume, search load, and user demand, organizations can anticipate resource requirements and establish a robust foundation for accommodating growth. Effective capacity planning not only prevents performance bottlenecks but also ensures a cost-efficient and well-managed deployment.

►Click here to read more.

This section outlines the following steps in ensuring that when key events arise, your Splunk infrastructure remains resilient, efficient, and ready to handle the uptick in demand:

  1. Assessing your current workload
  2. Forecasting data growth
  3. Anticipating key event demands
  4. Evaluating your storage requirements
  5. Understanding your network limitations

Assessing your current workload

Assessing the current workload of your existing Splunk deployment is the initial step in capacity planning. This analysis provides valuable insights into the performance of your system, identifies potential bottlenecks, and informs your resource allocation strategy. Here's a detailed guide on how to effectively assess your deployment's current workload:

  • Gather Performance Metrics: Collect comprehensive data on various performance metrics from your Splunk deployment. This includes information such as data volume, indexing rates, search rates, CPU usage, memory utilization, disk I/O, network traffic, and response times.
  • Data Volume Analysis: Determine the volume of data being ingested into your Splunk deployment over a specified period. Analyze trends in data growth to identify patterns, peak periods, and anomalies. Understanding the data volume helps you estimate the storage and processing resources required to manage incoming data.
  • Indexing Throughput: Measure how much data your Splunk deployment can index per second or per day, especially if you anticipate a surge in data ingestion during key events.
  • Data Retention and Storage: Understand how long data is retained and how quickly it moves from hot to cold storage. This not only impacts storage requirements but also search performance when accessing historical data.
  • Resource Utilization: Review CPU utilization, memory consumption, and disk I/O metrics across various components such as indexers, search heads, and forwarders. Identify any instances of resource saturation or bottlenecks that might lead to performance degradation.
  • Response Times and Latency: Measure the time it takes for search results to be generated and displayed to users. Evaluate the overall system responsiveness and identify any delays that might impact user experience.
  • Identify Performance Bottlenecks: Look for components or areas of your deployment that consistently exhibit high resource utilization, slower response times, or errors. Common bottlenecks might include overloaded indexers, resource-intensive searches, or network latency.
    • Search Head Constraints: If your search head is overburdened, you might notice slow search performance. This can be due to inadequate CPU or memory resources or because of sub-optimal search strategies.
    • Indexer Limitations: Indexers handle the heavy lifting of data ingestion. Monitor the indexing rate and queues to identify if the indexer is becoming a bottleneck.
    • Forwarder Performance: Ensure your universal forwarders or heavy forwarders are not overwhelmed, causing data ingestion delays.
    • Network Constraints: Ensure that there's ample bandwidth for data transfer, especially if you're dealing with distributed deployments.
  • Analyze Historic Trends: Trends in historical performance data can reveal seasonal patterns, growth trends, and the impact of changes made to your deployment.
  • User Patterns and Dashboards: Examine user behavior by studying how often users interact with dashboards, reports, and visualizations. Identify which dashboards are frequently accessed and which reports generate high search loads.
  • Running Splunk Apps: Each app can have unique requirements and demands on system resources. Evaluate the resource needs of the apps you use and ensure that they align with your overall system capacity.
  • Search Rates and User Patterns:
    • Collect Search Usage Data: Begin by collecting data on how users interact with the Splunk system. This includes gathering information about the number of searches performed, the frequency of searches, and the types of queries being executed.
    • Identify Peak Usage Times: Identify peak usage hours, days, or periods when users tend to perform the most searches. This will help you understand the times when the system experiences the highest demand.
    • Track the Number of Concurrent Users: The number of users accessing the Splunk platform simultaneously affects resource utilization. Multiple users performing searches, generating reports, and creating dashboards can strain system resources. Ensure that your infrastructure can handle concurrent user activities.
    • Categorize Search Types: Some searches might be simple and involve basic keyword searches, while others could be complex, involving multiple commands, fields, and subsearches.
    • Analyze Query Complexity: Complex searches that involve multiple fields, joins, and subsearches can put more strain on system resources compared to simple searches.
    • Consider Reporting and Dashboards: Reporting and dashboard functionalities might include scheduled searches or real-time visualizations that impact system resources differently.
    • Understand Search Intensity: Determine how frequently certain searches or dashboards are used. Some searches might be infrequent, while others could be part of daily or weekly operational routines.
    • Assess Resource Consumption: Use monitoring tools to track the resource consumption of different search queries. Measure factors such as CPU usage, memory consumption, and disk I/O during search activities.
    • Identify Resource Bottlenecks: For instance, if certain complex queries consistently lead to high CPU utilization, this could indicate a need for additional CPU resources.
    • Examine User Behavior: Analyze how users refine or modify their searches. Do they perform iterative searches, refining their queries based on initial results? Understanding this behavior can help allocate resources accordingly.
    • Evaluate Long-Running Searches: Long-running searches could impact system responsiveness and user experience, and they might require optimization.
    • Collaborate with Users: Engage with users and stakeholders to gain insights into their search requirements, preferences, and expectations. Understand their priorities and any specific search-related challenges they encounter.

By thoroughly analyzing performance metrics in your existing Splunk deployment, you lay the foundation for effective capacity planning. Splunk provides various monitoring tools and dashboards that offer insights into these workload measures. Leverage these tools to gain a comprehensive view of your deployment's health.

  • Splunk Monitoring Console (MC): A built-in tool, the Monitoring Console provides insights into the health and performance of your Splunk deployment. With its dashboards, you can monitor aspects like search performance, indexing rates, and resource usage.
  • Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring: A premium product, Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring offers support for a broad range of integrations for collecting all kinds of metrics and application data, that can help you gauge the capacity of your current Splunk deployment.

Forecasting data growth

Forecasting data growth is the next aspect of capacity planning for your Splunk deployment. It involves estimating the expected increase in data volume over a specific period, which enables you to allocate resources effectively and ensure your infrastructure can accommodate future demands. Here's a detailed approach to forecasting data growth:

  1. Collect Historical Data: Examine how the data volume has increased over the past months or years. Look for patterns, seasonality, and any significant events that might have influenced data growth.
  2. Identify Growth Factors: New data sources being onboarded, changes in business operations, expansion into new markets, regulatory requirements, and the introduction of new applications generating data can all contribute to data growth.
  3. Collaborate with Stakeholders: Engage with relevant stakeholders, including business units, data owners, and IT teams. Gather insights into upcoming projects, initiatives, and any changes that could impact data generation and storage requirements.
  4. Analyze Business Plans: Understand how your organization's plans, both for now and in the future, might translate into increased data volume. For instance, if your company is launching new products or expanding its customer base, it's likely to generate more data.
  5. Consider External Factors: External factors that might influence data growth, such as industry trends, regulatory changes, and technological advancements, could impact the type and volume of data being generated.
  6. Use Regression Analysis: Regression analysis involves using statistical techniques to model the relationship between historical data growth and relevant variables. This can help you create predictive models that estimate future data growth based on identified factors.
  7. Create Growth Scenarios: Develop different growth scenarios based on the identified factors. For example, consider a conservative growth scenario, a moderate one, and an aggressive one. Each scenario should reflect a different level of data volume increase.
  8. Estimate Data Volume: Estimate the potential data volume for each growth scenario over the defined planning period. This estimation should account for daily, weekly, and monthly variations in data generation.
  9. Adjust for Uncertainty: Recognize that forecasts might not always be accurate due to unforeseen events or changes. Incorporate a margin of error or buffer to account for uncertainties in your projections.
  10. Plan Infrastructure Scaling: Based on the estimated data growth, plan how you will scale your Splunk infrastructure to accommodate the projected demands. This might involve adding more indexers, increasing storage capacity, or optimizing resource allocation.
  11. Regularly Review and Refine: Data growth forecasting is an ongoing process. Regularly review your forecasts, track actual data growth, and refine your projections based on real-world data.
  12. Document Assumptions: Document the assumptions, methodologies, and data sources you used for your data growth forecasts. This documentation will be valuable for future reference and adjustments.

By forecasting data growth, you can proactively plan for the resources, infrastructure, and scalability required to handle increasing data volumes in your Splunk deployment. This strategic approach ensures that your environment remains efficient, responsive, and capable of meeting your organization's evolving data needs.

Anticipating key event demands

Key events, whether they're predictable, like Black Friday sales, or sudden, like a major service outage, can dramatically alter the demands on your Splunk infrastructure. By proactively anticipating these demands, you place your organization in a favorable position to manage increased loads while maintaining peak performance. This section will walk you through strategies to forecast data volume surges, estimate escalated search query frequencies, and will also highlight a real-world case study illustrating the tangible impact of key events on Splunk usage.

Forecasting data volume increases due to key events

  • Historical Analysis: Data ingestion rates from past key events offer insights into trends and patterns that are likely to repeat.
  • External Indicators: For instance, if you're launching a new product or running a significant marketing campaign, anticipate a rise in user activity and consequently, log data.
  • Engage with Stakeholders: Business and IT teams might have information about upcoming events, releases, or changes that could influence data volume.

Estimating the rise in searches during key events

  • User Activity Patterns: Look at patterns in user search activity during past key events. A sudden surge in traffic or user activity typically correlates with an increase in searches.
  • Scheduled vs. Ad Hoc Searches: During key events, there might be a need for more ad hoc searches for real-time insights. Factor in these alongside your routinely scheduled searches.
  • Complexity of Searches: Not all searches demand the same resources. Anticipate the types of searches users might conduct during key events. Complex searches with long time spans or involving large datasets require more resources.

Example key event case study

An e-commerce company heavily relied on the Splunk platform to monitor its application performance, especially during sale events like Black Friday. During the previous Black Friday sale, the company noticed a spike in data volume by 150% due to increased site traffic and transaction logs. Furthermore, there was a 70% surge in ad hoc search queries as teams were trying to gain insights into user behavior and site performance. While the Splunk infrastructure was able to handle the surge, it operated at peak capacity, leading to slower search returns and delayed insights. In the subsequent year, the company proactively scaled their infrastructure by 200% to handle anticipated data influx and increased search demands. They also optimized search strategies and educated users about efficient search practices.

Evaluating your storage requirements

Splunk stores and indexes data to enable fast and efficient searches and analysis. Here's how to evaluate storage requirements for your Splunk deployment:

  • Estimate Data Volume: Understand the amount of data you generate or collect daily, weekly, monthly, etc. This includes both incoming data and indexed data. Consider historical growth trends and business projections. This estimation serves as the foundation for your storage calculations.
  • Define Retention Policies: Determine how long you need to retain data for analysis, compliance, and legal reasons. Different types of data might have different retention periods. Some data might be kept for a few days, while other data might need to be retained for months or years.
  • Consider Compliance Regulations: Compliance regulations, such as data retention laws and industry-specific requirements, can impact how long you need to store data. Ensure your retention policies align with these regulations to avoid compliance issues.
  • Calculate Data Growth: Based on your estimated data volume and retention policies, calculate how much data you'll accumulate over time. This helps you understand the long-term storage needs of your deployment.
  • Choose the Right Index Configuration: Index configuration settings in the Splunk platform, such as data summarization, retention settings, and compression, can significantly impact storage requirements. Adjust these settings to optimize storage efficiency while maintaining necessary data accessibility.
  • Implement Data Lifecycle Management: Implement data lifecycle management strategies that determine when data should be moved to less expensive storage tiers or archived based on its age and access frequency. This helps balance performance needs with cost considerations.
  • Explore Cold and Frozen Data Storage: For data that is less frequently accessed, consider moving it to cold or frozen storage tiers, which are less expensive than high-performance storage. Splunk's SmartStore technology can help you seamlessly manage data across storage tiers.
  • Monitor and Adjust: Regularly monitor storage usage and growth patterns. As data volume increases, adjust your storage allocation accordingly. This might involve adding more storage to existing hardware or scaling your storage infrastructure.
  • Plan for Data Archival: In addition to estimating storage requirements, plan for data archival according to retention policies. Automate data archival processes to ensure that you're not storing unnecessary data, which can help optimize storage usage.

By following these steps, you can accurately evaluate storage requirements for your Splunk deployment. This ensures that you have the right amount of storage capacity to accommodate data growth, meet retention policies, comply with regulations, and maintain efficient search and analysis capabilities.

Understanding your network limitations

In the context of Splunk Enterprise deployment, you need to take certain networking considerations into account to ensure optimal performance, efficient data transmission, and seamless communication between different components of your deployment. Let's break down the key considerations.

  • Network Latency: Network latency refers to the delay in the transmission of data between different components due to the physical distance and network congestion. High network latency can negatively impact the speed at which data is transmitted between forwarders, indexers, search heads, and other elements of your Splunk environment. This delay can result in slower data processing, longer search times, and reduced overall system responsiveness. Choose a network setup with low latency to ensure timely and efficient communication between components.
  • Bandwidth: Bandwidth refers to the amount of data that can be transmitted over a network connection in a given period. Splunk deployments involve the constant movement of data between forwarders, indexers, and search heads. As your deployment scales and data volumes increase, the amount of data traversing the network can grow significantly. Having sufficient network bandwidth prevents network congestion, bottlenecks, and data transmission delays. Insufficient bandwidth can lead to slower data ingestion, indexing, and search operations.
  • Network Components: Network components, such as routers, switches, and network interface cards (NICs) should have the capacity to handle the expected data transfer rates within your Splunk deployment. High-speed, reliable, and well-configured network components will help ensure that data flows smoothly between forwarders, indexers, and search heads.
  • Data Transmission: In a distributed Splunk deployment, data is transmitted between forwarders and indexers. The speed and reliability of data transmission depend on the network infrastructure. It's important to ensure that your network can support the continuous flow of data without causing delays or data loss.
  • Search Performance: Searches performed in the Splunk platform involve querying and analyzing data across various components of the deployment. Network latency can affect how quickly search results are retrieved. A well-optimized network environment can contribute to faster search performance, enabling users to access insights and reports more promptly.
  • Geographic Distribution: If your Splunk deployment spans multiple geographic locations, network considerations become even more critical. The physical distance between components can introduce higher latency. In such cases, you might need to implement strategies such as content delivery networks (CDNs) or localized data centers to minimize latency and ensure efficient data transmission.
  • Load Balancing: Implement load balancing mechanisms for distributing network traffic evenly across components. Load balancers help prevent overloading specific components and ensure efficient resource utilization.
  • Security and Encryption: Implement proper network security measures, including encryption for data in transit and secure communication protocols. Data must be safeguarded during transmission, especially when dealing with sensitive information.
  • Redundancy and Failover: Design network configurations that allow for redundancy and failover mechanisms. In case of network failures, having alternative paths or backup connections helps maintain data availability and system uptime.
  • Network Monitoring: Implement robust network monitoring tools to track bandwidth utilization, latency, packet loss, and other network metrics. Regular monitoring provides insights into potential performance issues and aids in proactive troubleshooting.
  • Cloud Considerations: If your deployment is in the cloud, consider the network architecture provided by your cloud provider. Ensure that the cloud network infrastructure can support the data traffic patterns and performance requirements of your Splunk deployment.
  • Collaboration with Networking Teams: Networking teams can provide insights into network architecture, best practices, and potential optimizations to support your Splunk deployment.

By addressing these networking considerations, you can create a Splunk environment that operates smoothly, regardless of the data volume or user demands.

Helpful resources

Splunk OnDemand Services: Use these credit-based services for direct access to Splunk technical consultants with a variety of technical services from a pre-defined catalog. Most customers have OnDemand Services per their license support plan. Engage the ODS team at ondemand@splunk.com if you would like assistance.

Designing a scalable architecture

Designing a scalable and distributed architecture for Splunk Enterprise involves planning a framework that can effortlessly adapt to growing data volumes and user demands. This approach ensures that your Splunk environment remains efficient and responsive as your organization's requirements evolve.

►Click here to read more.

This section explores the key principles and strategies for achieving scalability and redundancy:

  1. Choosing the right topology
  2. Scaling up versus scaling out
  3. Evaluating the need for additional Splunk components
  4. Making hardware and infrastructure enhancements
  5. Leveraging cloud-based solutions for dynamic scaling
  6. Ensuring redundancy
  7. Allocating resources and managing workloads
  8. Planning for high availability and disaster recovery
  9. Testing and validating
  10. Monitoring for scaling indicators

Choosing the right topology

Choosing the right topology for your Splunk Enterprise deployment the first time will ensure efficiency scalability in the future. The selection of components, such as indexers, search heads, and forwarders, should be guided by your analysis of workload, data volume, user demand, and system requirements.

  • Role Distribution and Load Balancing: Distribute roles strategically to ensure workload distribution and redundancy. Indexers handle data storage and retrieval, while search heads manage search queries. Forwarders are responsible for data collection. Balancing these roles helps prevent overloading specific components and ensures optimal system performance.
  • Scaling for Future Growth: Anticipate future data growth and user demand when selecting components. Choose scalable hardware that can accommodate increased data volumes and user activities over time. This proactive approach avoids frequent hardware upgrades and system disruptions.
  • Geographical Distribution: If your organization spans multiple geographical locations, consider distributing components to minimize latency and optimize data access. This can enhance user experience and data availability across regions.
  • Splunk Deployment Architecture: Depending on your use case and requirements, you can opt for a standalone or distributed architecture. A distributed architecture, including search head clustering and indexer clustering, offers better performance, scalability, and fault tolerance. For more detail, see Splunk Validated Architectures or Indexing and search architecture.

By analyzing your workload, data volume, user demand, and other relevant factors, you can select the correct topology and components that align with your organization's deployment requirements.

Scaling up versus scaling out

  • Scaling Up (Vertical Scaling): This involves adding more resources (like RAM or CPU) to your existing machines.
    • Pros: Can be easier to implement; doesn't require significant changes to existing setup or more rack space.
    • Cons: Has physical limits; can become costly for significant upgrades.
  • Scaling Out (Horizontal Scaling): Horizontal scalability involves the ability to expand a system by adding more instances of a specific component rather than upgrading existing ones. In the context of a Splunk deployment, this means adding more indexers, search heads, or other components as the data volume, user load, and processing requirements increase. It contrasts with vertical scalability, which involves enhancing the capabilities of existing components, like adding more resources (CPU, memory) to a single machine.
    • Impact on Splunk Architecture: Horizontal scalability has a profound impact on the architecture of a Splunk deployment, offering several benefits:
      • Increased Performance: More instances of components distribute the workload, improving system performance and responsiveness.
      • Fault Tolerance: Distributed architecture enhances redundancy, reducing the risk of downtime due to a single point of failure.
      • Flexibility: Scalable architecture adapts to changing demands, allowing seamless growth without significant reconfiguration.
      • Resource Optimization: Load balancing between components optimizes resource utilization and ensures consistent performance.
      • Elasticity: Scalable architecture enables quick and efficient response to sudden spikes in data or user activity.
    • Factors to Consider When Scaling:Several factors should be considered when scaling various components of the Splunk architecture:
      • Workload Analysis: Understand the current and projected data volume, user load, and processing requirements to determine where scaling is needed.
      • Load Balancing: Distribute traffic evenly among instances using load balancers to avoid performance bottlenecks.
      • Resource Requirements: Evaluate the resource needs (CPU, memory, storage) of each component and ensure the new instances meet these requirements.
      • Inter-component Communication: Communication between components should be optimized to avoid latency or data transfer bottlenecks.
      • Data Distribution: When adding indexers, ensure proper data distribution and replication for high availability and efficient search.
      • Search Distribution: When scaling search heads, implement effective load balancing and routing mechanisms to evenly distribute search queries.
      • Monitoring and Alerting: Enhanced monitoring and alerting systems help proactively identify resource constraints or performance issues in scaled components.

    Designing for horizontal scalability involves anticipating growth and architecting a Splunk environment where components can be easily added to accommodate increased demands. This approach empowers your organizations to seamlessly expand its Splunk deployment while maintaining high performance, reliability, and responsiveness.

Evaluating the need for additional Splunk components

  • Indexers: As data ingestion rates climb, there may be a need for more indexers to handle the load and ensure efficient data querying.
  • Search Heads: With an increase in user base and concurrent searches, expanding the number of search heads can optimize search performance.
  • Forwarders: In distributed environments, deploying more forwarders can aid in data collection and forwarding efficiency.

Scaling forwarder management

The deployment server is a central component that simplifies forwarder management. It allows you to remotely configure and manage forwarders from a single location. A single deployment server can efficiently manage a large number of forwarders, often numbering in the thousands. To scale the deployment server, consider factors such as the server's hardware capacity, network bandwidth, and the number of forwarders it will manage. Load balancing and redundancy techniques can also be implemented to enhance the deployment server's availability and performance.

Scaling intermediate forwarders (or indexers)

Splunk pipeline queues play a pivotal role in managing the flow of data within your Splunk deployment, allowing for efficient data processing and forwarding. These queues can also serve as valuable indicators when considering scaling the intermediate forwarder tier of your deployment.

As data moves through the different stages of processing within a Splunk instance, it passes through pipeline queues. These queues are temporary storage areas that hold data waiting to be indexed, transformed, or forwarded. Monitoring the status and size of these queues provides insights into the data flow and overall system health.

When it comes to scaling the intermediate forwarder tier, monitoring the pipeline queues can offer key insights:

  • Queue Backlogs: A growing backlog in pipeline queues can indicate that the current set of intermediate forwarders might be struggling to keep up with the volume of data they are receiving. An increased backlog suggests a potential performance bottleneck that could lead to delayed data forwarding or even data loss if not addressed promptly.
  • Queue Capacity: If pipeline queues consistently approach or reach their capacity limits, it's a sign that the intermediate forwarder tier might require additional resources or scaling. As the data throughput increases, the queues should have sufficient capacity to accommodate the flow without causing data congestion.
  • Latency and Delay: Monitoring the latency between data arriving at the intermediate forwarders and its transmission to downstream components, such as indexers, can reveal potential delays. Prolonged latency might indicate that the intermediate forwarder tier is overwhelmed, warranting the addition of more intermediate forwarders to alleviate the strain.
  • Resource Utilization: Examining resource utilization on the intermediate forwarders, such as CPU, memory, and network bandwidth, in conjunction with queue metrics, can provide a comprehensive view of their performance. If resource utilization consistently approaches or exceeds recommended thresholds, it's a strong indication that scaling is needed.

When scaling the intermediate forwarder scaling, you need to strike a balance. Scaling too early can lead to unnecessary resource allocation, while scaling too late might result in performance degradation. Regularly monitoring the pipeline queues, along with other performance metrics, can help you make informed decisions about when to scale the intermediate forwarder tier. By maintaining visibility on these queues, you ensure a seamless and efficient flow of data throughout your Splunk deployment.

Making hardware and infrastructure enhancements

  • Memory Upgrades: Improving RAM can speed up search times, especially for large datasets.
  • Storage Solutions: Fast storage solutions, like SSDs, can accelerate data retrieval and writing processes.
  • Network Optimizations: Enhancing network bandwidth and reliability ensures seamless data flow between Splunk components.

Leveraging cloud-based solutions for dynamic scaling

  • Splunk Cloud Platform: Splunk's native cloud solution offers the full power of Splunk Cloud Platform without the need to manage physical infrastructure, providing scalability on demand.
  • Dynamic Resource Allocation: Cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud allow for dynamic resource scaling based on demand, ensuring you pay only for what you use.
  • Hybrid Solutions: Combine on-premises deployments with cloud solutions to create a balanced, scalable, and cost-effective Splunk ecosystem.

Ensuring redundancy

  • Redundant Components: Deploy redundant components, such as redundant indexers and search heads, to ensure high availability. In case of hardware failures or maintenance activities, the backup components can seamlessly take over to prevent disruptions.
  • Data Replication: Configure data replication across multiple indexers to safeguard against data loss. Replicating data ensures that even if one indexer fails, the data remains accessible from the replicated copies.
  • Forwarder-to-Indexer Ratios: Maintain a reasonable forwarder-to-indexer ratio to prevent overloading indexers. Consider factors like CPU cores, available storage, and network bandwidth when determining the number of forwarders a single indexer can handle.

Allocating resources and managing workloads

Workload management involves effectively allocating resources to ensure that your Splunk deployment can handle the anticipated data growth, search load, and user demand. Here's how you can approach resource allocation:

  • Forecast Data Growth: Based on your analysis of historical data growth trends and projected increases, estimate how much storage space will be needed to accommodate the expected volume of data. Ensure that your storage capacity is sufficient to store the indexed data without running out of space.
  • Search Load and User Demand: Consider the peak usage periods and concurrent user activity that you've identified through user behavior analysis. Estimate the number of searches that will be executed simultaneously during these periods. This estimation helps in allocating CPU and memory resources for search processing.
  • CPU and Memory: Calculate the CPU and memory resources required to process the expected search and indexing workloads. Different types of searches and queries might have varying resource demands. Allocate sufficient CPU cores and memory to ensure that searches run efficiently.
  • Disk I/O and Storage: Data indexing and retrieval involve disk I/O operations. Assess the disk I/O requirements for indexing new data, searching existing data, and handling concurrent user queries. Choose storage solutions with appropriate IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) capabilities to support the workload.
  • Hardware Specifications: Based on your resource requirements, determine the hardware specifications needed for your servers or cloud instances. This includes selecting the right number of CPU cores, memory capacity, and disk configurations. Ensure that the chosen hardware can handle the projected workload without performance bottlenecks.
  • On-Premises or Cloud Deployment: Decide whether to deploy your Splunk environment on-premises or in the cloud. Cloud solutions offer scalability and flexibility, while on-premises deployments require careful planning to ensure hardware resources align with workload requirements.
  • Elasticity and Scaling: If you choose a cloud deployment, take advantage of cloud-native features that enable automatic scaling. Configure auto-scaling rules based on metrics like CPU utilization to dynamically allocate resources as needed.
  • Testing and Validation: Before deployment, conduct performance testing to validate that the allocated resources can handle the expected workload. Simulate scenarios of peak usage and data growth to ensure that the system remains responsive and efficient.
  • Monitoring and Adjustment: Implement monitoring mechanisms to track resource utilization during actual usage, as well as identify any resource bottlenecks or underutilized resources. Adjust resource allocation as needed to optimize performance.
  • Future Growth Considerations: Anticipate your future growth and scalability requirements, and choose hardware or cloud solutions that allow for easy expansion as your data volume, search load, and user demand continue to increase.
  • Alignment with Business Goals: Ensure that your resource allocation aligns with the overall business goals of your Splunk deployment. Balancing performance requirements with cost considerations will help you achieve an optimal solution.

Whether deploying on-premises or in the cloud, aligning your resource allocation strategy with the anticipated workload ensures that your Splunk environment can deliver the required performance and responsiveness. By accurately forecasting data growth, understanding search load, and estimating user demand, you can allocate the right amount of CPU, memory, disk I/O, and storage resources.

Planning for high availability and disaster recovery

When considering High Availability and Disaster Recovery in your capacity planning for the Splunk platform, you need to account for additional resources required for redundant instances and failover scenarios. This includes:

  • Resource Duplication: You'll need to allocate resources for the redundant components, such as indexers, search heads, and forwarders, in the HA setup. These components should be capable of handling the normal workload in case of a failover.
  • Data Replication: HA and DR setups involve real-time or near-real-time data replication between primary and secondary instances. This requires additional network bandwidth and storage.
  • Failover Performance: The secondary components need to be capable of taking on the workload without degrading performance. This might mean provisioning slightly higher resources than the primary components.
  • Geographical Considerations: For DR, you might choose a different geographical location, which might impact network latency, bandwidth requirements, and data transfer rates.
  • Testing and Maintenance: To ensure that failover procedures work as expected, regularly test and maintain your the HA and DR setups. This requires resources and planning.

These considerations ensure that your Splunk deployment remains resilient, available, and capable of withstanding both hardware failures and larger-scale disasters.

Disaster recovery

Disaster recovery focuses on the strategies and procedures put in place to recover a Splunk environment after a major failure or catastrophic event. This could include hardware failures, data center outages, natural disasters, or any situation that disrupts normal operations. A comprehensive DR plan for the Splunk platform involves:

  • Backup and Restore: Regularly backing up critical Splunk configurations, indexes, and metadata is fundamental to ensuring data availability and disaster recovery. Backups capture the state of the environment at specific points in time, enabling you to restore the system to a functional state in case of data loss, corruption, or system failures. Backup strategies should encompass both system configurations and user-generated content, such as saved searches, reports, and dashboards. The frequency of backups should align with the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of your organization.
  • Using Version Control for Backup and Restore: An additional approach to consider for backup and restore is using version control systems, such as Git. While version control is traditionally associated with code management, it can also serve as an effective method for tracking changes to Splunk configurations and objects.
  • Splunk Replication using Search Factor and Replication Factor: By configuring appropriate search and replication factors, you can enhance disaster recovery capabilities that are native in the Splunk platform.
    • Search Factor: The search factor in the Splunk platform refers to the number of searchable copies of indexed data that must be available for searches to function properly. For example, a search factor of two means that at least two searchable copies of each indexed event must be available.
    • Replication Factor: The replication factor determines the number of copies of indexed data stored across the indexer cluster. Having multiple copies of data improves fault tolerance and availability in case of hardware failures or data loss.
    • Splunk SmartStore: Splunk SmartStore is an architecture that separates the storage of indexed data from the compute resources of the indexers. It allows you to store data in object storage solutions, such as Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage, while retaining index metadata on local storage.
  • Off-site Data Replication: Replicating data to an off-site location ensures that if the primary data center is affected, a copy of the data remains safe and accessible. This can significantly reduce downtime and data loss.
  • Data Center Redundancy: Setting up redundant data centers in different geographical locations provides failover capabilities. If one data center becomes unavailable, operations can switch to the backup data center seamlessly.
  • Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO): Define acceptable RTO (how quickly you need to recover) and RPO (how much data loss is tolerable) metrics. These metrics guide your DR strategies and the choice of technologies.

High availability

High availability ensures that the Splunk environment remains accessible and functional even during planned maintenance or unexpected failures. The goal is to minimize downtime and maintain continuous service availability. Key aspects of HA in the Splunk platform include:

  • Load Balancing: Distributing incoming traffic across multiple instances ensures even workload distribution and prevents any single component from becoming overloaded.
  • Redundancy: Deploying redundant instances of key components (such as indexers, search heads, forwarders) eliminates single points of failure. If one instance fails, another can seamlessly take over.
  • Clustering: Clustering indexers enables data replication across multiple nodes, ensuring data availability even if a node goes down. It also enhances search performance by distributing query processing.
  • Search Head Pooling: With multiple search heads in a pool, search queries can be load-balanced across them, improving responsiveness and reliability.
  • Deployment Server and Apps: Use a deployment server to manage consistent configurations across instances. Centralized management simplifies updates and maintenance.
  • Splunk SmartStore: SmartStore allows offloading cold data to lower-cost storage solutions while maintaining fast search performance. This optimizes resource utilization and lowers costs.

Incorporating both disaster recovery and high availability strategies into your Splunk deployment ensures that your data remains secure, your services are resilient to failures, and your business operations continue uninterrupted. These strategies should align with your organization's specific needs, compliance requirements, and risk tolerance.

Example functional requirements

  • DR: Data Recovery: The system must have the capability to recover data to a previous state in the event of data loss or corruption.
    • Impact on Architecture: Replication mechanisms and backup strategies must be implemented to ensure data redundancy and recovery points.
  • HA: Continuous Access: The system must remain operational and accessible even during hardware failures or maintenance activities.
    • Impact on Architecture: Load balancing and failover mechanisms are required to distribute traffic and ensure uninterrupted service.
  • DR: Service Restoration: In case of a disaster, the system should be able to restore services to an acceptable level within a specified time frame (RTO - Recovery Time Objective).
    • Impact on Architecture: Redundant infrastructure and automated recovery processes must be in place to minimize downtime.

Example non-functional requirements

  • HA: High Availability: The system should achieve a high level of uptime, ensuring that it remains accessible and operational for a significant portion of time.
    • Impact on Architecture: Distributed architecture with redundant components and failover mechanisms are essential to achieve high availability.
  • DR: Recovery Point Objective (RPO): The maximum allowable data loss in case of a disaster should be defined (for example, no more than one hour's worth of data loss).
    • Impact on Architecture: Frequent data replication or synchronization between primary and secondary sites is necessary to meet the RPO.
  • HA: Scalability: The architecture should be designed to scale seamlessly as the user load and data volume increase.
    • Impact on Architecture: Scalable components such as indexers and search heads should be part of the architecture, and load balancing mechanisms must be in place.
  • DR: Geographic Redundancy: Data should be replicated across geographically dispersed sites to ensure disaster recovery in the event of a site-wide failure.
    • Impact on Architecture: Multiple data centers and replication mechanisms across different locations are required.
  • HA: Performance: The system should maintain optimal performance even during high loads and spikes in user activity.
    • Impact on Architecture: Load balancing, performance optimization, and efficient resource allocation are needed to achieve this requirement.
  • DR: Recovery Testing: Periodic testing of the disaster recovery plan should be conducted to ensure its effectiveness.
    • Impact on Architecture: Test environments and procedures must be established to simulate disaster scenarios without impacting the production environment.

It is important to understand that both functional and non-functional requirements for DR and HA have significant impacts on the architecture of a Splunk deployment. These requirements influence decisions related to redundancy, replication, failover mechanisms, data synchronization, geographic distribution, scalability, and performance optimization. A well-designed architecture addresses these requirements to ensure data availability, operational continuity, and resilience in the face of disasters and failures.

Testing and validating

Load testing and simulations allow you to assess the scalability and performance of your infrastructure under different scenarios. Here's how to conduct testing and validation effectively:

  • Define Test Scenarios: Identify different usage scenarios that your Splunk deployment might encounter. For example, simulate scenarios with varying data volumes, search rates, concurrent users, and complex queries. These scenarios should reflect both typical and peak usage patterns.
  • Set Up a Testing Environment: Create a separate testing environment that mirrors your production environment as closely as possible. This includes the same hardware specifications, software versions, network configurations, and data sources.
  • Generate Realistic Data: Generate realistic test data that closely resembles your actual data. This can include synthetic data or anonymized production data. The goal is to ensure that your tests reflect real-world scenarios.
  • Define Performance Metrics: Identify key performance metrics to measure during testing. These metrics could include response times, search execution times, CPU and memory utilization, network bandwidth, and disk I/O rates.
  • Execute Load Tests: Run load tests using the predefined test scenarios. Simulate the expected data volume, search patterns, and user interactions. Monitor the performance metrics to identify any performance bottlenecks or resource limitations.
  • Analyze Test Results: Analyze the test results to identify areas of concern. Look for performance bottlenecks, resource saturation, slow response times, and any deviations from expected performance levels.
  • Optimize and Adjust: Based on the test results, make necessary adjustments to your deployment. This might involve scaling resources, optimizing configurations, adjusting indexing strategies, or fine-tuning search parameters.
  • Iterative Testing: Conduct multiple rounds of testing with different scenarios and adjustments. This iterative process helps you refine your deployment configuration for optimal performance.
  • Validate Redundancy and Failover: During testing, validate the high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) mechanisms in your deployment. Simulate failover scenarios to ensure that redundant components can take over seamlessly in case of failures.
  • Address Identified Issues: Address any performance bottlenecks, resource constraints, or issues that were uncovered during testing. This might involve hardware upgrades, software optimizations, or changes to deployment architecture.
  • Document Results and Lessons Learned: Document the results of each testing round, including the identified issues, actions taken, and improvements observed. This documentation serves as a reference for future scalability assessments.

Use the insights gained from testing to create a scalability plan. This plan should outline how you will scale resources, distribute workloads, and implement redundancy to ensure smooth growth of your deployment.

Monitoring for scaling indicators

Capacity planning is an ongoing process. This iterative process involves continuous monitoring of performance metrics, baselining historical data, and analyzing trends. By comparing actual usage with initial projections, organizations can identify performance bottlenecks, resource saturation, and mismatches in expected usage. This analysis drives informed decisions to scale resources, optimize configurations, and ensure alignment with evolving business needs. You might need to accommodate growth, changes in infrastructure, and new user behavior. Regularly documenting and communicating changes, as well as learning from past experiences, enhance the capacity planning process, fostering a resilient and agile Splunk deployment that optimally supports data analytics objectives.

  • Indexer Throughput and Storage: Monitor the indexing rate and storage utilization of your indexers. If you observe consistent high indexing rates nearing the limits of your indexers' capacity or storage approaching full capacity, it's an indicator that you might need to scale by adding more indexers or expanding storage.
  • Search Performance: Keep an eye on search performance metrics such as search response time, search concurrency, and search job queue length. If searches start taking longer to complete, concurrency is consistently high, or search job queues are getting backed up, it could be a sign that additional search heads are needed to handle the workload.
  • Forwarder Health: If you notice forwarders becoming overloaded or encountering communication issues, it might be necessary to scale by adding more forwarders or redistributing the load.
  • Network Latency: High network latency between components can impact data transmission and search performance. If latency consistently exceeds acceptable thresholds, consider optimizing network connections or adding resources to handle data movement.
  • Resource Utilization: Regularly monitor the CPU, memory, and disk utilization of your Splunk components. If you observe high and sustained resource usage, it's an indication that your current resources might be insufficient, necessitating additional resources or more efficient resource allocation.
  • Queue Lengths: Keep track of queue lengths in various components, such as indexer queue lengths and search job queues. If queues consistently grow and stay high, it could signify resource contention and the need for scaling to distribute the workload.
  • Event Rate: Monitor the rate at which events are ingested, indexed, and searched. Rapidly increasing event rates might indicate the need to scale to handle the higher load.
  • Data Volume and Retention: If your data volume is growing rapidly and approaching the limits of your current setup, it's a signal to consider scaling.
  • Response Time: If the response times of your overall Splunk environment start to slow down consistently, it could be an indicator that resources are becoming constrained.
  • Custom Monitoring: Custom monitoring, based on your specific use case and requirements, could involve monitoring application-specific metrics or unique performance indicators that are critical to your deployment.
  • Alerts and Anomalies: Implement alerting mechanisms to notify you when specific metrics cross predefined thresholds or when anomalies are detected. These alerts can provide early warning signs that scaling might be necessary.

By monitoring these key points and setting up proactive alerting, you can identify performance bottlenecks, resource limitations, and increased demands, allowing you to make informed decisions about when and how to scale your Splunk deployment effectively. To get started, see Configuring the splunkd health report.

Helpful resources

Splunk OnDemand Services: Use these credit-based services for direct access to Splunk technical consultants with a variety of technical services from a pre-defined catalog. Most customers have OnDemand Services per their license support plan. Engage the ODS team at ondemand@splunk.com if you would like assistance.