Splunk Core Certified User Practice Exam

In Splunk, forwarders utilize port 9997 to send data to the indexers or other Splunk instances. This specific port is the default for receiving data from Universal Forwarders and Heavy Forwarders, which are responsible for collecting and forwarding logs and events from monitored sources to the Splunk server.

When you configure a forwarder, whether it is a Universal Forwarder or a Heavy Forwarder, you specify the destination indexer with the IP address and port number, which by default is 9997. This designates that the forwarder is communicating with the receiving server configured to listen on that port.

The other ports mentioned have different purposes. For instance, port 8089 is used for management and internal API communications within Splunk, port 9998 is associated with a different service within Splunk (not commonly used for data forwarding), and port 8000 is primarily for the Splunk Web interface. Thus, the use of port 9997 is crucial for ensuring the effective transmission of logs and other data to Splunk's indexing layer.