Objective 3.1
Enterprise Certified ArchitectUnderstand design and size indexes
Objective 3.1 sits in Infrastructure Planning: Index Design, which carries 5% of the Enterprise Certified Architect exam. The questions below are original, written from the official objective title above, and each explanation cites the Splunk page it rests on.
Objective title verbatim from the official objectives. Splunk exam page ↗
A worked example
Shown solved, with the whole explanation open: this is what every question here carries.
You are sizing disk for a new index and open its directory to see what is stored there. Which two categories do the files in an index fall into?
Correct.
Checked against help.splunk.com, August 2026Concept
One half is the compressed original and the other is what makes it findable. Sizing and integrity questions both come back to that split.
Why D
Splunk states that an index contains files falling into two main categories: the raw data in compressed form, and index files that point to the raw data, also called tsidx files, plus some metadata files.
Source
Splunk Docs: Indexes, indexers, and indexer clusters, checked August 2026A Splunk Enterprise index contains a variety of files. These files fall into two main categories: The raw data in compressed form ( rawdata ) Indexes that point to the raw data ( index files, also referred to as tsidx files ), plus some metadata files…
Now you: objective 3.1 questions
No account needed. The explanation opens when you answer.
Sample question 1 of 3
Your design document refers to buckets throughout, and a reviewer needs to know what they are on disk. What are buckets in an index?
Sample question 2 of 3
Your storage plan must account for what Splunk does with index data over months rather than days. What eventually happens to indexes as they age?
Sample question 3 of 3
A new application writes logs to a directory on a monitored host and your analysts want them searchable. What starts Splunk indexing that data?
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Read the sources
These are the official pages the questions above cite. Reading them is studying the objective from the primary source, which is what the explanations point you toward anyway.