https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/7.3.0/Admin/Wheretofindtheconfigurationfiles
"To determine the order of directories for evaluating configuration file precendence, Splunk software considers each file's context. Configuration files operate in either a global context or in the context of the current app and user"

This is explained in the Splunk documentation1, which states:
If an indexer goes down during a search, the search head notifies you that the results might be incomplete. The search head does not attempt to re-run the search on another indexer.

https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/8.1.0/Data/ConsiderationsfordecidinghowtomonitorWindowsdata
"The Splunk platform collects remote Windows data for indexing in one of two ways: From Splunk forwarders, Using Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI). For Splunk Cloud deployments, you must use the Splunk Universal Forwarder on a Windows machines to montior remote Windows data."

Reference:
Splunk platform attempts native authentication first. If authentication fails outside of a local account that doesn't exist, there is no attempt to use LDAP to log in. This is adapted from precedence of Splunk authentication schema.

https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/latest/Deploy/Datapipeline "The data pipeline segments in depth. INPUT - In the input segment, Splunk software consumes data. It acquires the raw data stream from its source, breaks it into 64K blocks, and annotates each block with some metadata keys. The keys can also include values that are used internally, such as the character encoding of the data stream, and values that control later processing of the data, such as the index into which the events should be stored. PARSING Annotating individual events with metadata copied from the source-wide keys. Transforming event data and metadata according to regex transform rules."