What is data retention and a bucket lifecycle (hot, warm, cold, frozen) in Splunk? [Advanced]
Answer
Splunk stores indexed data in buckets that move through lifecycle stages such as hot, warm, cold, and frozen. Hot buckets are actively written, warm and cold are searchable historical buckets, and frozen data is archived or deleted based on retention policy.
Technical explanation
Retention is controlled by size and time settings such as maxTotalDataSizeMB and frozenTimePeriodInSecs.
Hot and warm storage is usually faster and more expensive; cold storage can be larger and slower.
Frozen is not searchable unless archived data is restored or handled through a separate process.
Hands-on example
Example: prod_app logs retain 30 days, security logs retain 365 days, and audit logs archive to object storage for 7 years. Configure indexes.conf retention settings, monitor bucket growth, and test restore procedures for frozen audit data.
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