Objective 3.2

Enterprise Certified Architect

Estimate non-smart store related storage requirements

Objective 3.2 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.

3-2Infrastructure Planning: Index Design

An engineer asks what database software the indexes need. What does Splunk say?

A document storeThe index is a set of files rather than an external service.
A relational storeNo relational database ships with the indexing layer.
None, flat filesCorrect · your answerCorrect.
A key value storeThe KV Store serves app collections rather than the index.

Correct.

Checked against help.splunk.com, August 2026

Concept

Flat files mean the storage layer is inspectable and portable with no separate service to keep alive. Capacity planning becomes a question about disks.

Why C

Splunk states that it handles everything with flat files and does not require any third-party database software running in the background.

Source

Splunk Enterprise handles everything with flat files; it doesn't require any third-party database software running in the background.

Splunk Docs: Indexes, indexers, and indexer clusters, checked August 2026
#indexes#storage

Now you: objective 3.2 questions

No account needed. The explanation opens when you answer.

Sample question 1 of 2

3-2Infrastructure Planning: Index Design

A team lead asks what an indexer cluster does to storage requirements. What does Splunk say?

Sample question 2 of 2

3-2Infrastructure Planning: Index Design

A team lead asks where index directories live. Which path does Splunk name?

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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.

More objectives in Infrastructure Planning: Index Design