Getting out of sync errors in a Search Head clustering Environment.

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Updated:September 28, 2026
Document ID:SPLK044453

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Applicability

Splunk Enterprise

Description

Environment:-

About 500+ UF 7.1.2 sending events to 2 indexers 7.1.2 which with index clustering feature enabled via 2 Heavy forwarders 7.1.2 and 4 search head with SH clustering.
almost of all Splunk server and UF are 7.1.2 except a few universal forwarders that are 6.3.3, 6.4, 7.1.0.

A few of the SH members were stopped last week due to /opt getting full.

Now the SH's are up but they are showing the below error on their UI:-

Error pulling configurations from the search head cluster captain; consider performing a destructive configuration resync on this search head cluster member.

The Search Head Cluster can fall out of sync with what the captain has listed as configuration updates for various reasons: unsuspected outage, network issues, and large size for replication are just a few of the reasons we can see this issue occurring for.
What is actually occurring is the member attempting to apply the set of intervening replicated changes from the captain and if the set exceeds the purge limits and the member and captain no longer share a common commit, a banner message appears on the member's UI, with text similar to the following:
  
Error pulling configurations from the search head cluster captain; consider performing a destructive configuration resync on this search head cluster member.To resolve this we must manually resync the cluster members with the captain.



 

Resolution

Confirm the following message is appearing on the UI or in splunkd.log:

Error pulling configurations from the search head cluster captain; consider performing a destructive configuration resync on this search head cluster member.

Confirm which node is the current captain by running the following command from the Splunk bin directory:
  
./splunk show shcluster-status
Once you confirm that which node is the captain then from the nodes which are out of sync and getting the errors please run the below command:-
./splunk resync shcluster-replicated-config

Splunk Documentation
Perform a manual resync:
https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/latest/DistSearch/HowconfrepoworksinSHC#Perform_a_manual_resync

Revision History

Revision Publish Date Comments
1.0
28-Sep-2026
Initial Release

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