Indexes are where Splunk Enterprise stores all the data it has processed. It is essentially a collection of databases that are, by default, located at $SPLUNK_HOME/var/lib/splunk. Before data can be searched, it needs to be indexed—a process we describe here.
Tip from the Fez: There are a variety of intricate settings which can be manipulated to control size and data management aspects of an index. We will not cover those in this book, however as your situation requires complexity, be sure to consider a variety of topics around index management, such as overall size, buckets parameters, archiving and other optimization settings.
There are two ways to create an index, through the Splunk user interface or by creating an indexes.conf file. You will be shown here how to create an index using the Splunk portal, but you should realize that when you do that...