Splunk Enterprise Certified Admin 2025 – 400 Free Practice Questions to Pass the Exam

The configuration file that is crucial for defining input sources on a forwarder is inputs.conf. This file is specifically designed to specify the data sources that the forwarder will monitor and ingest into Splunk. Within inputs.conf, you can configure various types of data inputs, such as monitoring files and directories, listening for network events, or collecting other types of data.

The correct usage of inputs.conf allows administrators to tailor data collection to suit their environment, ensuring that the forwarder only captures the relevant data needed for indexing and analysis. This targeted approach helps improve performance and manageability of the Splunk deployment by filtering noise and focusing on meaningful events.

In contrast, props.conf is used for data parsing and transformations at index time, serverclass.conf is for defining groups of forwarders for the purpose of deploying configurations, and deploymentclient.conf is utilized for configuring a Splunk forwarder to connect to a deployment server but does not handle input definitions directly. Each of these other configuration files plays a role in the configuration and management of Splunk components, but inputs.conf is uniquely designated for defining input sources on a forwarder.