Retention of data

[keahey]

What is the standard retention of data in Operations manager.  I have heard it is 6 months.  Is there a way to change that to 1 year or even 5 years?  I know that it is going to increase the amount of space needed to store the DB, but I have been getting this question a lot lately.

[agireesh]

Hi Keahey,

Maximum retention period of data in operation manger is 1 year. As per my information

there is no option to change this retention period.

Regards,

Gireesh

[adaikkap]

Hi

     There are two type of data stored in the DFM  server.

1. Operation Manager data (stored in sybase database)
2. Performance Advisor data  (stored in flat files)

Operations Manager data is stored in two kinds of tables in the db, one is called non-historic and historic table.The point in time data, is used in generating alerts and shown in all reports and web ui using the non-historic table(except the graphs).Similarly all the graph shown in the web ui, show consolidated or historic data from the historic tables. By default they have 1d,1w,1m,3m and 1y.The data beyond 1y is not shown in webui but they can be accessed using the dfm graph cli.As a matter of fact, none of the data is  purged from the database, esp., the history tables keeps growing and are never purged.So if data for a graph is required beyond 1 year, say 2 years then use the dfm graph cli with the graphname suffixed with 1y and specify the start and end time.

Performance Advisor data is stored in flat files and they are purged based on the retention set for each counter group.The collection frequency, retention duration  and the counter group that are enabled for each filer can be seen at the NMC-Performance Data->Setup-Host->Datacollection.

Hope this helps and answers your question.

Also below is a link to all TR and documents related to DFM in which there is one talking about capacity management and historic data.

OnCommand(DFM) and its related Technical Reports

Regards

adai

[hadrian]

Hi Adai,

That link doesn't seem to work for me is there an alternate link?

Question #2 - Any problem with retaining performance data for 2 years?  For an Operations Manager instance monitoring 200 nodes?  😃

Hadrian

[adaikkap]

Hi Hadrian,

     Below is the link, let me know if it doesn't work.

http://communities.netapp.com/thread/15840

Question #2 - Any problem with retaining performance data for 2 years?  For an Operations Manager instance monitoring 200 nodes?  =)

Retaining more PA history definitely slows down the retrieval time for the PA views, it also increases the dbbackup time as the PA data also needs to be backedup.

Regards

adai

[hadrian]

OK. If I am willing to deal with it being slow – then it is OK? There are no issues with instability?

Hadrian

[adaikkap]

Not that I am aware of.

Regards

adai

[hadrian]

Thanks Adai.

What about if they lower the performance counter sample rate? Isn’t that dangerous – or is that just for monitoring intervals?

The customer wants one minute for everything, which seems to be the default, EXCEPT for one counter group: perf.

# dfm perf data describe perf 20086

Counter Group: perf

File Name: perf_15_20086_4

Number Records: 37129

Sample Rate: 10.0 minutes

Max Records: 52560

Used Space: 17.0 MB

Max Projected Space: 24.0 MB

Oldest Record: Wed Jun 23 21:59:34 2010

Newest Record: Sat Aug 20 00:50:34 2011

# dfm version

dfm 5.0 (5.0)

Any idea on what exactly that one does?

[adaikkap]

Hi Hadrian,

     By lower sample rate you mean ? decrease the sample rate values from default ? That would put more load on the controllers and dfm server.

I dint get the second question.

Regards

adai

[hadrian]

I found it in TR-3751:  the perf counter group contains the following counters:

perf:data_disk_util_percnt_histo

perf:ops_per_sec_histo

perf:parity_disk_util_percnt_histo

Since all are at 1 min except for this one, I figure there is a good reason why someone decided it should be longer, so we should leave it at default.

Thanks,

Hadrian