Splunk® Enterprise

Capacity Planning Manual

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Estimate your storage requirements

This topic describes how to estimate the size of your Splunk Enterprise index, so that you can plan your storage capacity requirements.

When Splunk Enterprise indexes your data, it creates two main types of files: the "rawdata" file that contains the original data in compressed form and the index files that point to this data. (It also creates a few metadata files, which don't consume much space.) With a little experimentation, you can estimate how much index disk space you will need for a given amount of incoming data.

Typically, the compressed rawdata file is 10% the size of the incoming, pre-indexed raw data. The associated index files range in size from approximately 10% to 110% of the rawdata file. The number of unique terms in the data affect this value.

Depending on the data's characteristics, you might want to tune your segmentation settings, as described in About segmentation in the Getting Data In Manual.

The best way to get an idea of your space needs is to experiment by indexing a representative sample of your data, and then checking the sizes of the resulting directories in $SPLUNK_HOME/var/lib/splunk/defaultdb.

On *nix systems, follow these steps

Once you've indexed your data sample:

1. Go to $SPLUNK_HOME/var/lib/splunk/defaultdb/db.

2. Run du -ch hot_v* and look at the last total line to see the size of the index.

On Windows systems, follow these steps

1. Download the du utility from Microsoft TechNet.

2. Extract du.exe from the downloaded ZIP file and place it into your %SYSTEMROOT% or %WINDIR% folder.

Note: You can also place it anywhere in your %PATH%.

3. Open a command prompt.

4. Once there, go to %SPLUNK_HOME%\var\lib\splunk\defaultdb\db.

5. Run del %TEMP%\du.txt & for /d %i in (hot_v*) do du -q -u %i\rawdata | findstr /b "Size:" >> %TEMP%\du.txt.

6. Open the %TEMP%\du.txt file. You will see Size: n, which is the size of each rawdata directory found.

7. Add these numbers together to find out how large the compressed persisted raw data is.

8. Next, run for /d %i in (hot_v*) do dir /s %i, the summary of which is the size of the index.

9. Add this number to the total persistent raw data number.

This is the total size of the index and associated data for the sample you have indexed. You can now use this to extrapolate the size requirements of your Splunk Enterprise index and rawdata directories over time.


Have questions? Visit Splunk Answers to see what questions and answers other Splunk users had about data sizing.

How Splunk Enterprise calculates disk storage
Distribute indexing and searching


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