splunk-admon.exe

by Splunk / Cisco
SIEM / Log Collection

Summary

Splunk Active Directory Monitor - collects AD change events for the Splunk Universal Forwarder.

splunk-admon.exe is the 272nd most commonly executed Windows program in EchoTrail's dataset, observed 43,626 times across enterprise environments. It typically runs from C:\Program Files\Splunk\bin and it is most often launched by splunkd.exe.

272nd
most commonly executed Windows program
43,626
observed executions
medium
statistical confidence

Behavior

Top Paths

  • C:\Program Files\Splunk\bin75.58%
  • C:\Program Files\SUFwd\bin22.87%
  • C:\Program Files\SplunkUniversalForwarder\bin1.56%

Top Hashes (SHA256)

  • d191f6bd4fa09b0b80211e794e9b35353ed1a9aa2c3c9cd30767b7ba87dfb96593.63%
  • 1975b03b41c2278f96226c5888c63edb29390f1f960751519ca9af2037a9c5926.37%

Process Ancestry

Top Grandparents

Top Parents

Top Children

Rare or environment-specific process names are omitted from ancestry tables. Percentages are of all observed relationships.

Security Analysis

What does splunk-admon.exe normally do?

Helper process of the Splunk Universal Forwarder. Collects specific data types (AD, network, registry, event logs) and passes them to splunkd.exe for forwarding.

When is splunk-admon.exe suspicious?

Running without a Splunk installation. Running from unexpected paths. Parent other than splunkd.exe.

False positive notes

Normal in environments with Splunk Universal Forwarder deployed.

Related Processes

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Data from EchoTrail's dataset of ~346M Windows process executions. Last extracted 2026-08-04.