Deploying the Splunk binary
Splunk provides binary distributions for Windows and a variety of Unix operating systems. For all Unix operating systems, a compressed .tar file is provided. For some platforms, packages are also provided.
If your organization uses packages, such as deb or rpm, you should be able to use the provided packages in your normal deployment process. Otherwise, installation starts by unpacking the provided tar to the location of your choice.
The process is the same, whether you are installing the full version of Splunk or the Splunk universal forwarder.
The typical installation process involves the following steps:
- Installing the binary
- Adding a base configuration
- Configuring Splunk to launch at boot
- Restarting Splunk
Having worked with many different companies over the years, I can honestly say that none of them used the same product or even methodology for deploying software. Splunk takes a hands-off approach to fit in as easily as possible into customer workflows.
