I recommend going with the UF and using the regular splunk forwarder connections using TCP 9997, mainly because you are not guaranteed delivery with UDP - it's basically fire-and-forget. For a decent comparison between TCP and UDP check the following: http://www.diffen.com/difference/TCP_vs_UDP
In addition to just using a more reliable protocol, the UF gives you a host of other useful features, such as queuing (indexer down -- no worries, data is queued and sent once indexer is available), bandwidth throttling, splunk app (config bundles) distribution, etc.
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