Installing Splunk Enterprise

Installing Splunk is a fairly easy and straightforward process if you've make adequate preparations, as we did in the previous chapter. You will find a list of system requirements for your choice of operating system, as well as full instructions for installing Splunk for each type in the Installation Manual: http://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/latest/Installation/Whatsinthismanual.

That is a fairly long document to read through – make sure that you at least read the system requirements section: http://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/latest/Installation/Systemrequirements.

Note that if you are utilizing AWS EC2 instances for your Splunk deployment, Amazon offers an AMI (Amazon Machine Image) that includes Splunk Enterprise 7.x (at the time of writing this book), so if you pick this AMI as you spin up your instance, it will come up with Splunk installed and ready to go!

We will go through some basic installation steps in this section, and then move on to configuring Splunk on each server to perform its specific function.