Splunk Core Certified Consultant SPLK-3003 Question # 3 Topic 1 Discussion

 This is the minimum and least disruptive change necessary to protect the searchability of the indexer cluster in case of indexer failure, because it ensures that there are always at least two copies of each bucket in the cluster, one of which is searchable. This way, if one indexer fails, the cluster can still serve search requests from the remaining copy. Increasing the replication factor and search factor also improves the cluster’s resiliency and availability.

The other options are incorrect because they either do not protect the searchability of the cluster, or they require more changes and disruptions to the cluster. Option A is incorrect because enabling maintenance mode on the CM does not prevent excessive fix-up, but rather delays it until maintenance mode is disabled. Maintenance mode also prevents searches from running on the cluster, which defeats the purpose of protecting searchability. Option B is incorrect because leaving replication_factor=2 means that there is only one searchable copy of each bucket in the cluster, which is not enough to protect searchability in case of indexer failure. Enabling summary_replication does not help with this issue, as it only applies to summary indexes, not all indexes. Option C is incorrect because converting the cluster to multi-site requires a lot of changes and disruptions to the cluster, such as reassigning site attributes to all nodes, reconfiguring network settings, and rebalancing buckets across sites. It also does not guarantee that there will always be a searchable copy of each bucket in each site, unless the site replication factor and site search factor are set accordingly. References:

Splunk Core Consultant knowledge source documents or study guide: https://www.splunk.com/en_us/resources/splunk-certification-exam-study-guide.html

Splunk Test Blueprint Consultant: https://www.splunk.com/en_us/pdfs/training/splunk-test-blueprint-consultant.pdf