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When performing a distributed search from a search head, you can restrict your
searches to specific search peers (also known as "indexer nodes") by default and
in your saved and scheduled searches. The names of your Splunk search peers
are saved as values in the "splunk_server" field. For more information about
distributed search, see "What is distributed search?" in the Distributed
Deployment manual.
If no search peer is specified, your search accesses all search peers you have
permission to access. The default peers that you can access are controlled by
the roles and permissions associated with your profile and set by your Splunk
admin. For more information, see "About users and roles" in the Admin manual.
The ability to restrict your searches to specific peers can be useful when there is
high latency to certain search peers and you do not want to search them by
default. When you specify one or more peers, those are the only servers that are
included in the search.
You can specify different peers to search in the same way that you specify other
field names and values. In this case, the field name is "splunk_server" and the
field value is the name of a particular distributed peer:
splunk_server=<peer_name>
Note: You can use the value "local" to refer to the Splunk instance that you are
searching from; in other words, the search head itself.
splunk_server=local
Keep in mind that field names are case sensitive; Splunk will not recognize a
field name if the case doesn't match.
Examples
Example 1: Return results from specified search peers.
error (splunk_server=NYsplunk OR splunk_server=CAsplunk) NOT
splunk_server=TXsplunk
Example 2: Search different indexes on distributed search peers "foo" or "bar".
(splunk_server=foo index=main 404 ip=10.0.0.0/16) OR (splunk_server=bar
index=mail user=admin)
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