Methods, systems, apparatuses, and computer program products are directed to the generation of a global index structure. Agents executing on different data sources locally pre-process (e.g., format, filter, compress, encode, serialize etc.) data generated thereby and index such data. The agents also manage the resources thereof to perform the pre-processing and indexing operations. Each index generated by an agent is formatted as a plurality of index nodes. The index nodes and pre-processed data are provided to backend server(s) that maintain the global index structure and store the data in a globally distributed file system, which aid in unexpected disaster recovery. The backend server(s) generate the global index structure based on the index nodes. As new index nodes are received by the backend servers, the backend servers merge the newly-received index nodes with the global index structure. Global index structure traversal techniques for retrieving search keys are also described herein.