Splunk Enterprise Certified Architect Practice Test

In a Splunk indexer cluster, the default values for the replication factor and the search factor play crucial roles in ensuring data availability and fault tolerance. The replication factor, which is set to 3 by default, determines how many copies of each piece of indexed data should be stored across the cluster. This allows for resiliency; if one indexer fails, copies of the data still exist on other nodes, ensuring that no data is lost. The search factor, defaulting to 2, specifies how many copies of the data must be searchable at any given time. This ensures that there are available copies of the indexed data for search queries, even if some nodes are down or under maintenance. By having two searchable copies, the system can maintain performance and access to data during such events. Thus, the combination of a replication factor of 3 and a search factor of 2 effectively balances data accessibility with redundancy, catering to the needs of a distributed environment where data integrity and availability are paramount.