Explanation
The Auto Deployment feature of Distributed Configuration Management is a tool that allows you to automatically distribute configuration files, such as indexes.conf, to your Splunk platform instances. However, using this feature to distribute indexes.conf can pose a risk of having indexes with different settings across your instances. This can happen if you have manually edited the indexes.conf file on some of your instances, or if you have different versions of Splunk Enterprise Security installed on different instances. If the indexes have different settings, such as retention policies, storage paths, or bucket sizes, this can cause data inconsistency, search inefficiency, or data loss. Therefore, it is recommended to use the Manual Deployment feature of Distributed Configuration Management to review and validate the indexes.conf file before deploying it to your instances12. References = 1: Distributed Configuration Management - Splunk Documentation - Auto Deployment. 2: Distributed Configuration Management - Splunk Documentation - Manual Deployment.