Splunk Administration Interview Questions And Answers

Splunk Administration Interview Questions And Answers for experienced professionals from Codingcompiler. These Splunk Administration interview questions were asked in various interviews conducted by top multinational companies across the globe. We hope that these interview questions on Splunk Administration will help you in cracking your job interview. All the best and happy learning.

In this Splunk Administration Interview Questions Blog, You Will Learn 

Splunk Administration Interview Question
Splunk AdministrationInterview Questions and Answers
Frequently asked Splunk Administration Interview Questions 
Advanced Splunk Administration Interview Questions and Answers

Splunk Administration Interview Question

  1. What is Splunk Administration?
  2. How do you reset Splunk Admin Password?
  3. Why is Splunk used for the analysis of machine data?
  4. Why is Splunk administration used for the analysis of machine data?
  5. How does Splunk help in the Organization?
  6. Give a few use cases of Knowledge Objects?
  7. Explain the use of License Master in Splunk?
  8. Why do companies adopt Splunk?
  9. How is a career path in Splunk Administration?
  10. What are the components of Splunk?
  11. Why use only Splunk?
  12. What will you do in case License Master is unreachable?
  13. Can you tell some use cases of Knowledge Objects?
  14. What are the components of Splunk?
  15.  What is the use of the deployment server in Splunk administration?

Splunk AdministrationInterview Questions and Answers

Q. What is Splunk Administration?

Answer: 

Splunk is mainly used to make machine data reachable, utilizable & helpful to everyone. It also helps to examine the massive volume of machine data that is produced by technology infrastructure & IT systems in virtual, physical & in the cloud.

Q. How do you reset Splunk Admin Password?


Answer: To reset the admin password, log into the server on which Splunk is installed and rename the password file and then restart Splunk. After doing this, you can log in using default username: admin password: changeme.

Q. Why is Splunk used for the analysis of machine data?

Answer: This is because of the valuable insights it gives into  IT app management, compliance, operations, security, and detection of threat & fraud very.

Q. Why is Splunk administration used for the analysis of machine data?

Answer: 

Splunk administration is considered as a great tool which will allow the visibility of data that will be generated from machines such as hardware devices, IoT devices, servers, and other sources. As it helps to provide crucial insights into IT operations, it is used for analyzing the machine data with ease.

Q. How does Splunk help in the Organization?

Answer: 

Most of the corporations are investing in this technology as it helps to examine their end-to-end infrastructures, shun service outages & gain real-time critical insights into client experience, key business metrics & transactions.

Q. Give a few use cases of Knowledge Objects.

Answer: Knowledge objects can be used in many domains. Few examples are:

  • Application Monitoring: Your applications can be monitored in real-time with configured alerts to notify when an application crashes.
  • Physical Security: You can have the full leverage of the data containing information about the volcanos, floods, etc. to gain insights, if your firm deals with them.
  • Network Security: With the usage of lockups from your knowledge objects, you can increase security in your systems by blacklisting certain IPs from getting into your network.
  • Employee Management: If you want to monitor the activity of people who are serving their notice period, then you can create a list of those people and create a rule preventing them from copying data and using them outside.

Q. Explain the use of License Master in Splunk?

Answer: License Master ensures that your Splunk environment remains within the limits of purchased volume. It also makes sure that the indexers within the Splunk deployment have sufficient capacity to license the right amount of data.

Q. Why do companies adopt Splunk?

Answer: 

  1. It works as ‘Google” for log files
  2. The users can use simpler terms to search with the aim of Search processing Language(SPL)
  3. It does not require any database or backend as the data is directly stored in the Spunk file system
  4. With Splunk, there is no chance of encountering even a single point of failure.

Q. How is a career path in Splunk Administration?

Answer: 

Splunk Administration career is extremely lucrative where the experts are getting the highest paid salary range when compared to other technologies. The various job roles in the Splunk careers are high such as system engineers, Software engineers, programming analysts, security engineers, solutions architects & technical services managers.

Q. What are the components of Splunk?


Answer: The main components of Splunk are Forwarders, Indexers and Search Heads. Deployment Server(or Management Console Host) will come into the picture in case of a larger environment.

Deployment servers act as an antivirus policy server for setting up Exceptions and Groups so that you can map and create a different set of data collection policies each for either window based server or a Linux based server or a Solaris based server.

Frequently asked Splunk Administration Interview Questions 

Q. Why use only Splunk?

Answer: Splunk has a lot of competition in the market, for performing IT operations, for analyzing machine logs, providing security and doing business intelligence. But, there is no one single tool other than Splunk that can do all of these operations and that is where Splunk comes out of the box and makes a difference. Splunk helps in scaling up infrastructure and get professional help from a firm supporting the platform.

Q. What will you do in case License Master is unreachable?

Answer: In case the license master is unreachable, it is just not possible to search for the lost data within the platform. Though the data coming into the indexer would not be affected, and it would continue to move into the Splunk deployment server. In addition, the indexer will continue to index the data. The only change that you will notice is an alert message on the search head alerting that the number of index volume has been exceeded. To tackle the situation, you have to either check the volume of data flowing or get a higher capacity of license. The indexing never stops when only the search function terminations.

(OR)

If the license master is unreachable then there is no possibility to search the data. However, there will not be any effect & it will have a continuous flow of the Splunk deployment & the indexing will continue the index. Moreover, there will also be a warning message when the indexing volume will get exceed.

Q. Can you tell some use cases of Knowledge Objects?

Answer: Knowledge objects can be employed in different domains such as in Application monitoring, Network security, Physical security, Employee management, and Data searching.

  • Application Monitoring – It is possible with knowledge objects to monitor your applications in real-time, configure alerts for notifying in case there is downtime or when application crashes
  • Network security –  You can improve the security in your systems by blacklisting certain IPs from entering your system. This can be accomplished by employing Knowledge objects known as lookups.
  • Employee Management: Knowledge objects also enable you in monitoring the activities of the people who are in their notice period. You can make a list of these people and make a rule to stop them from replicating the data and leveraging it outside.
  • Application Monitoring: With the help of knowledge objects, monitoring your applications in real-time and configure alerts to notify you in case of any downtime or if your app crashes becomes possible.
  • Physical Security: In case your business is dealing with physical security, then you can benefit from data that has info on flooding, volcanoes, earthquakes, etc to extract valuable insights

Q. What are the components of Splunk?

Answer: The three components of Splunk are Forwarder, Search Head and Indexer. Forwarder gathers data from different sources and then forwards it to the Indexer. The indexer then stores it locally in the cloud/ the host computer. Search head carries out various functions on this stored data like search, analyze and visualize. Note: In a larger setting, it is possible to have another component called Deployment Server or Management Console Host. The deployment server behaves like an antivirus policy server helping to implement groups and exceptions. This component also helps users in mapping and creating policies for multiple data set collection for servers like Linux, Windows, or Solaris based servers. It can also be used to manipulate various apps running on various operating systems from one single place.

Q. What is the use of the deployment server in Splunk administration?

Answer: 

The deployment server usage is more efficient which probably controls the host-independent connotations, path naming conventions, machine naming conventions from a central location.

Q. Does Splunk administration support user authentication systems?

Answer: 

The Splunk administration will support the various authentication systems such as Splunk internal authentication with role-based user access, LDAP, A scripted authentication API for use with an external authentication system like PAM or RADIUS, Multifactor authentication & Single Sign-on.

Q. What is Splunk cloud administration?

Answer: Here, mostly all the tasks will be handled by the Splunk cloud administrator to use the data in an efficient manner.

(OR)

In order to use all data effectively, all necessary tasks are supposed to be handled by this cloud administration. 

Q. What do you understand by Splunk Administration? What is the latest version of the tool Splunk?

Answer: 

Splunk can be regarded as a platform that makes data accessible to users. You can have easy visibility of data generated from hardware devices, networks, servers, and other sources. The Splunk administration helps to analyze plenty of data that is used in various plenty of IT operations, security, threat and detecting any fraud cases. Splunk is a vital tool that is used in businesses for data analytics. The latest version of the tool is Splunk 6.3.

Advanced Splunk Administration Interview Questions and Answers

Q. How many types of Splunk forwarders are there?

Answer:

The Splunk forwarder is of two types, and they are namely – 

1. Heavy Forwarders – It actually works as an intermediate forwarder that analyzes the data before it is sent to the indexer.

2. Universal Forwarders – It also helps to process any data before it is forwarded to the indexer.

Q. Draw a difference between Splunk app and Splunk add-on?

Answer:

A common factor between both the application and add-on is that it has a preconfigured configuration. But the point of difference is that the latter lacks visual features that are preconfigured in Splunk apps.

Q. Why people prefer Splunk as compared to other open-source options?

Answer: Splunk is the only tool is capable of managing operations like data analysis, giving security & managing IT operation and doing business intelligence. This is how Splunk makes a difference and assists users to scale their business infrastructure.

Q.  Which Splunk Roles can share the same machine?

Answer: Most of the riles can be shared on the same machine including Indexer, Search Head and licensed Master. However, in the case of larger deployments, the preferred practice is to host each role on stand-alone hosts.

Q. What is Splunk DB connect?

Answer: Splunk DB is a general SQL database plugin that enables adding database information with Splunk reports. It helps in providing scalable and reliable integration between relational databases and Splunk Enterprises.

Q.  If you wish to use a free version of Splunk, which features are lacking?

Answer: 

The free version of the platforms lacks certain features such as

1. Authentication and scheduled searches
2. Distributed search
3. Deployment management of the platform
4. Forwarding of data into TCP or HTTP

Q. What is the difference between Search time and Index time field extractions?

Answer: As the name suggests, Search time field extraction refers to the fields extracted while performing searches whereas, fields extracted when the data comes to the indexer are referred to as Index time field extraction.

Splunk training includes training in basic search, sharing and saving of results, creating tags and event types, generating reports, and charts creation hope this set of Splunk interview questions and answers will help you in preparing for your interview.

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