Splunk Admin Interview Questions

1) What exactly is Splunk Administration?

Ans: Splunk is primarily used to make machine data accessible, usable, and useful to everyone. It also aids in the examination of the massive volume of machine data generated by technology infrastructure and IT systems in virtual, physical, and cloud environments.

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2) What role does Splunk play in the organization?

Ans: Most firms are investing in this new tech because it allows them to examine their end-to-end systems, avoid service outages, and gain real-time key insight into customer service experience, core business metrics, and transactions.

3) What are the prerequisites for Splunk Administration training?

Ans: There are no specific prerequisites for taking Splunk Administration training, but desired aspirants with subject knowledge skills in system administration, Linux, Windows, and so on will have an advantage.

4) Who is eligible for Splunk Administration training at reputable institutions?

Ans: Aspirants who want to become Splunk Administration experts in today's IT world can enroll in this course. IT employees, data security professionals, business analytics professionals, Splunk beginners, and Big Data technology experts can all benefit from taking the course.

5) What exactly is Splunk free?

6) How do I set up Splunk?

Ans: The Splunk configuration files are the main brains behind Splunk's operation, controlling the entire behavior of Splunk. All of the files are saved with the.conf extension and can be easily edited or read with the appropriate access.

7) How does a career in Splunk Administration look?

Ans: When compared to other techniques, Splunk's Administration career is incredibly profitable, with experts earning the best earning pay scale. Splunk careers offer a wide range of job opportunities, including system engineers, software engineers, programmer analysts, security professionals, solutions architects, and technology consulting managers.

8) Why should you use Splunk over other open-source alternatives?

9) Why is Splunk administration used for machine data analysis?

Ans: Splunk administration is regarded as an excellent tool for providing visibility into data generated by machines such as hardware devices, IoT devices, servers, and other sources. It can be used for evaluating machine data quickly and easily because it helps to provide important insight into IT operations.

10) How do you explain Splunk's operation?

Ans: Splunk administration is built around three main components: forwarded, indexer, and search head.

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11) What role does a deployment server play in Splunk administration?

Ans: The deployment server seems to be more effective, and it likely controls the host-independent implications, path naming conventions, and machine naming conventions from a central location.

12) Is it possible to use user authentication systems with Splunk administration?

Ans: Splunk administration might very well support a variety of authentication systems, including Splunk internal authentication with role-based user access, LDAP, a scripted authentication API for use with an external authentication system, such as PAM or RADIUS, multi factor authentication, and single sign-on.

13) What does Splunk cloud administration entail?

Ans: The Splunk cloud administrator will handle the majority of the tasks in order to make the best use of the data.

14) What exactly do you mean by Splunk Administration? What is the most recent version of the Splunk tool?

Ans: Splunk can be thought of as a platform that makes data available to users. Data generated by hardware devices, networks, servers, and other sources can be easily viewed. Splunk administration aids in the analysis of large amounts of data that are used in a variety of IT operations, security, threat detection, and fraud detection. Splunk is a critical data analytics tool used in businesses.

15) Can you delete the platform's search history?

Ans: You can clear the search history by deleting ‘$splunk home/var/log/splunk/searches.log' from the Splunk server.

16) How do you turn off the launch message that appears on the platform?

17) Which features are missing if you use a free version of Splunk?

Ans: 

Certain features of the platforms are missing in the free version, such as

1. Authentication and pre-programmed searches

2. Dispersed search

3. Platform deployment management 

4. Data forwarding into TCP or HTTP

18) What role does License Master play in Splunk?

Ans: This platform license is in charge of ensuring that the appropriate amount of data is submitted to the index. The license is activated based on the amount of data that flows into it within 24 hours. It also helps to ensure that the platform's environment stays within the volume of data that it receives.

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19) How do you install and update Splunk Enterprise?

Ans: Splunk enterprise installation must be kept private, and you must verify the hardware compatibility so that the framework can be implemented efficiently. Following verification, you could indeed install the organization on operating systems like windows, Linux, MoS, and others. Furthermore, you can upgrade the enterprise when necessary.

20) How do I find or change the current LDAP configurations?

Ans: To explore or adjust the current LDAP configurations, follow these steps: Under users & authentication, click the access control button. Then click LDAP, and from the resulting page, you can easily control specific strategies, view information, and track the LDAP mappings to Splunk roles.

21) Name the common port numbers that the Splunk platform uses.

Ans. The following are the commonly used port numbers by the platform Splunk.:-

• Splunk Web Port - 8000
• Splunk Indexing Port - 9997
• Splunk Network Port - 514
• Splunk Management Port - 8089
• Splunk Index Replication Port - 8080
• VK Store - 8191

22) What is Splunk Forwarder, and what are its different types?

Ans. Splunk forwarder is a component of Splunk architecture that acts as an agent to collect logs from the remote machines. It forwards these logs to the indexer for storage and further processing. The following are the two types of Splunk Forwarders:-

• Universal Forwarder
• Heavy Forwarder

Universal Forwarder - A Universal Forwarder in Splunk is the best forwarder to send the raw data to an indexer without processing. It performs initial processing and data analysis before sending it to the indexer.

Heavy Forwarder - It is a heavy component that helps to process and filter the required data. Using a heavy forwarder can resolve many problems as it processes data at the source before forwarding the same to the indexer.

23) Explain the different types of Alerts available in Splunk.

Ans. Alerts in Splunk are the actions that are triggered when certain user-defined conditions are met. However, there are three different types of Splunk alerts available.

• Scheduled Alerts
• Rolling Window Alerts
• Pre-result Alerts

Scheduled alerts are mainly based on a historical search that runs on the schedule opted based on the set timing. 

Rolling window alerts are hybrid alerts based on real-time searches. It examines all the events and states a specific time when a particular event meets a window. 

Pre-result alerts are the most common type of Splunk alerts that run overall time.

24) Define Splunk Indexer

Ans. Splunk Indexer is a Splunk component that helps to build and manage indexes. Further, it indexes and stores the incoming data from the forwarder. The indexer helps to transform the incoming data into various events and stores the same within indexes to execute search operations effectively.

25) Distinguish between Splunk and Spark

Ans.

Splunk platform is useful for collecting huge amounts of machine-generated data and supports easy integration with Hadoop. It also makes it available for access to a large audience. Also, it works in a streaming mode. 

Spark is an open-source software used for big data processing. It is mostly used with Apache projects and works on both streaming and batch mode.

26) Explain the different versions of Splunk.

Ans. Splunk has three different versions- Splunk Enterprise, Splunk Light, and Splunk Cloud. Let us know more about these Splunk versions,

• Splunk Enterprise:- Many IT organizations use the Splunk’s Enterprise edition that helps to analyze data from different apps and websites. 
• Splunk Cloud:- This edition is a Software as a Service (SaaS) that provides similar features to Splunk Enterprise Edition.
• Splunk Light:- This free edition of Splunk software allows us to search, edit, and report users' log data. The Splunk light version has very limited features compared to the other versions.

27) Name the different Splunk Licenses types?

Ans. The following are the different types of Splunk Licenses available.

• Splunk Enterprise license
• Free Splunk license
• Forwarder license
• Splunk Beta license
• Splunk Licenses useful for distributed search or search heads
• Licenses useful for replication of index (cluster members)

28) Explain the different search modes in Splunk.

Ans. There are various search modes that the Splunk platform holds, such as.

• Fast
• Verbose
• Smart

• Fast - This search mode is useful to speed up searches by limiting the data types returned by searches.
• Verbose - This search mode in Splunk is useful to return full event information, but it has a very slow search performance. 
• Smart - The smart mode toggles search behavior based on your search contains. It behaves in a fast manner when the search includes transforming commands. Otherwise, it works in verbose mode.

29) What is meant by Splunk App?

Ans. Splunk app is a directory comprising configurations, dashboards, search results, etc., within Splunk.

30) Name the most important Splunk configuration files.

Ans. The following are the most important configuration files in the Splunk platform.

• props.conf
• transforms.conf
• Server.conf
• Inputs.conf
• indexes.conf

31) What is meant by License Violation in Splunk?

Ans. In Splunk, the term license violation refers to the warning that occurs whenever the platform exceeds data limits. The commercial Splunk licensing has a limit of 5 alerts, and the free version has only three alerts.

32) Define the benefits of analyzing data into Splunk through forwarders.

Ans. A few benefits of using Splunk include a TCP connection, secured SSL connection, and proper bandwidth while trying to move data from a forwarder to an indexer. In case the indexer works slowly due to network issues, then we can forward the data to another index in a short time. Additionally, the forwarder considers the events before sending them to get a data backup.

33) What is meant by Source Type in Splunk?

Ans. It is the way of data identification in Splunk.

34) Explain the terms Replication Factor and Source Factor in Splunk.

Ans. In Splunk, the Replication factor and Source factor are the functions related to search head and index clustering. 

Search Factor:- This factor is related to index clustering, which helps to compute the number of searchable data copies. The indexing cluster maintains these data copies. It holds two (2) as a default value.
Replication Factor:- This factor is related to search head and index clustering. It helps compute the total number of data copies that the indexing cluster maintains. Moreover, it is also helpful in determining the data copies maintained by the search head cluster. This factor holds three (3) as a default value.

35) Name the most important search commands in the Splunk platform.

Ans. The following are the most important search commands in Splunk.

• Abstract
• Accum
• Typer
• Fill down
• Add totals
• Rename
• Anomalies

36) Explain the MapReduce algorithm in Splunk.

Ans. MapReduce is a programming model that helps in processing large data sets. In Splunk, this algorithm is useful for fast data searching. Moreover, it helps to process large data sets through a parallel and distributed algorithm on a cluster.

Conclusion:
In the above blog post we had covered all the important splunk admin interview questions These questions help the individuals to crack the interview process easily. If you found anything not covered please drop your query in the comments section to get them answered.