Splunk Enterprise Certified Admin 2026 – 400 Free Practice Questions to Pass the Exam

The configuration file that specifies how a forwarder should connect to indexers is outputs.conf. This file is essential for defining the settings related to where and how data collected by the forwarder should be sent. It includes configurations for specifying the indexers or receiving Splunk instances, the port to use, load balancing options, and other connection-related settings.

Using outputs.conf allows the forwarder to effectively route data to the appropriate indexers, ensuring that the data is indexed correctly and is accessible for searching and analysis. It plays a critical role in the overall architecture of a Splunk deployment, particularly in environments where multiple indexers are used for load balancing and redundancy.

The other configuration files serve different purposes. inputs.conf is designed for managing data inputs on the forwarder, props.conf is used for parsing data and defining field extractions and source type definitions, while transforms.conf is responsible for altering the data and applying transformations but does not handle output configuration to indexers.