https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/7.3.1/Data/Configurecharactersetencoding
"Configure character set encoding. Splunk software attempts to apply UTF-8 encoding to your scources by default. If a source foesn't use UTF-8 encoding or is a non-ASCII file, Splunk software tries to convert data from the source to UTF-8 encoding unless you specify a character set to use by setting the CHARSET key in the props.conf file."

http://www.splunk.com/view/SP-CAAAGPR

URL https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/8.2.2/DistSearch/Configuredistributedsearch
"To activate distributed search, you add search peers, or indexers, to a Splunk Enterprise instance that you desingate as a search head. You do this by specifying each search peer manually."