Install the Splunk Forwarder on Ubuntu
Category : How-to
The Splunk Universal Forwarder is a small, light weight daemon which forwards data to your main Splunk server from a variety of sources.
This guide assumes that you have already installed the Splunk server to receive the data.
Download the Splunk Universal Forwarder .deb file from the Splunk website:
Upload the file to your Ubuntu server and place it a temporary directory.
Run the dpkg command to install the Splunk server. The file name of the .deb file may change as new versions are made available so make sure that you have downloaded.
dpkg -i splunkforwarder-6.0.3-204106-linux-2.6-amd64.deb
The output will look like the below. Once you see complete, the Splunk Forwarder installation will be complete.
Selecting previously unselected package splunkforwarder. (Reading database ... 28352 files and directories currently installed.) Unpacking splunkforwarder (from splunkforwarder-6.0.3-204106-linux-2.6-amd64.deb) ... Setting up splunkforwarder (6.0.3-204106) ... complete
Next we need to create the init.d script so that we can easily start and stop Splunk. Change the the Splunk directory and run the splunk executable with the below arguments.
cd /opt/splunkforwarder/bin/ ./splunk enable boot-start
Press SPACE to view all of the license agreement and then Y to accept it.
You can now start the forwarder daemon using the init.d script.
service splunk start
See reading log files with the Splunk Forwarder to read your first log file and send the data to the Splunk server.