Splunk Fundamentals 1 Practice Exam

What do search heads send searches to?

1. Data Sources

2. Application Servers

3. Indexers

4. Forwarders

The correct answer is: Indexers

Search heads are specialized components in a Splunk architecture responsible for executing searches for users. When a search is initiated, the search head distributes the search requests to different indexers. Indexers manage the actual data storage and retrieval from the indexed data, making them crucial in processing search requests. The search heads orchestrate the search jobs and collect results from the indexers, which allows users to run complex searches on large datasets efficiently. By sending searches to indexers, the search heads leverage the backend processing power of the indexers to carry out the searches, processes, and aggregations necessary for producing meaningful outputs. This design enhances scalability, as multiple indexers can process searches concurrently, thus improving performance and enabling the handling of large volumes of data. The other options do not serve the specific role that indexers do in this context. Data Sources and Application Servers do not process search requests, and while forwarders are used for sending log data to indexers, they do not perform search operations nor receive search requests from search heads.