How Does Splunk Work?
Splunk is a software mainly used for searching, monitoring, and examining machine-generated Big Data through a web-style interface. Splunk performs capturing, indexing, and correlating the real-time data in a searchable container from which it can produce graphs, reports, alerts, dashboards, and visualizations.
Splunk Search Head
In a distributed search environment, a Splunk Enterprise instance that handles search management functions, directing search requests to a set of search peers and then merging the results back to the user. A Splunk Enterprise instance can function as both a search head and a search peer.
Splunk Indexer
A Splunk Enterprise instance that indexes data, transforming raw data into events and placing the results into an index. It also searches the indexed data in response to search requests.
Splunk Forwarder
Splunk forwarder is one of the components of Splunk infrastructure. Splunk forwarder acts as an agent for log collection from remote machines. Splunk forwarder collects logs from remote machines and forwards them to the indexer (Splunk database) for further processing and storage.
Source: Splunk
