The Splunk Professional Services (PS) best practice for ingesting network data, such as syslog, is to establish a dedicated data collection tier. This involves using a syslog server (e.g., syslog-ng, rsyslog) to receive the UDP or TCP traffic and write the events to log files on disk. This method provides a persistent buffer, preventing data loss if the downstream Splunk components are unavailable. A Universal Forwarder (UF) is then used to monitor these files. The UF is lightweight, highly scalable, and provides the most reliable data transport by checkpointing its position in the files, ensuring data fidelity and resilience against outages. This architecture decouples the data source from the Splunk indexing tier.

A. Direct network input on a heavy forwarder is not a best practice as it lacks the file-based buffering that prevents data loss during outages.

B. Universal forwarders cannot parse data, and direct UDP input is inherently unreliable, leading to certain data loss if the forwarder is unavailable.

C. While using a syslog server is correct, a heavy forwarder is resource-intensive and not the preferred choice for simple file monitoring; a lightweight universal forwarder is optimal.

1. Splunk Enterprise Documentation, Getting Data In Manual: In the section "Get syslog data into Splunk Enterprise," the documentation explicitly states the best practice: "For production environments, Splunk recommends that you configure a separate syslog server to receive the data, and then write the data to files. You can then use a Splunk universal forwarder to read the files and send the data on to a Splunk indexer." This confirms that an intermediate syslog server writing to files, monitored by a UF, is the recommended architecture for reliability and scalability. (See: Splunk Docs, Getting Data In, "Best practice: Use a dedicated syslog server").

2. Splunk Enterprise Documentation, Forwarding Data Manual: This manual details the roles of different forwarder types. It describes the Universal Forwarder as the best choice for collecting data from file-based sources and forwarding it with minimal resource consumption. It clarifies that UFs do not perform parsing, which should occur on the indexing tier. This supports using a UF over an HF for monitoring the files created by the syslog server. (See: Splunk Docs, Forwarding Data, "Types of forwarders").