How to setup Splunk Universal Forwarder on Windows Azure web role?

Question

What is the best way(cost effective) to setup Splunk Universal Forwarder on a Windows Azure web role instance?

The download page on Splunk Website has an installer for Windows, but not sure how could we run in to install and configure on every deployment to Windows Azure.

Answer 1

You can use Azure Startup task for this. Here are the steps you can follow:

1. Build a powershell script which will install Splunk Universal Forwarder (reference - http://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/6.0.3/Forwarding/DeployaWindowsdfviathecommandline)

2. Add a startup task to your web role. This startup task can be a batch file that will trigger the above powershell. (Reference - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh180155.aspx)

Package and deploy the cloud service. Once the status of the Web role becomes Ready, you can RDP and verify the universal forwarder installation.