Splunk is like an iceberg, on the surface we see the major components: indexers, search heads, license master, cluster master but under the water line we have a huge number of forwarders collecting and aggregating data streams. These forwarders are the foundations of any installation and configuration issues translate into problems with alerts, search performance, cluster stability and scaling out. This talk shows you to various ways to measure the efficiency of data collection and how to improve it. Prepare for lots of complex searches to identify common problems and charts that show good and bad. The talk aims to revolutionise how you think about forwarders and data collection in Splunk and turbo charge your platform performance and improve stability.