What action can a Heavy Forwarder perform that a Universal Forwarder cannot?

A Heavy Forwarder is designed with more robust capabilities compared to a Universal Forwarder, particularly in the context of data processing. One significant action that a Heavy Forwarder can perform is parsing and indexing data before it forwards it to another Splunk instance. This means that the Heavy Forwarder can prepare the data by extracting useful information and organizing it based on predefined rules, ensuring that the data is already structured and non-redundant when received by another Splunk server.

In contrast, a Universal Forwarder is a lightweight version of a forwarder that is specifically optimized for simply collecting data and sending it to a Splunk instance without any additional processing. It lacks the capability to perform parsing and indexing, which limits its functionality in complex scenarios where data transformation is needed before forwarding.

This distinction highlights the Heavy Forwarder's ability to handle more sophisticated data processing tasks, making it suitable for environments with more complex data ingestion requirements.