Monitoring Device Administration › How the Management Console Manages Database Growth › Database Capacity

Database Capacity

The management console automatically limits the growth of its database to 120 million rows. A row contains the performance metrics for the TCP sessions between an application hosted on a server and a client network during a 5-minute interval. Note that the network portion of the combination can be the actual client IP address or, if you defined a network as a /23 mask (or lower), an aggregate of all the client IP addresses in the subnet.

Depending on the number of days you want the management console to keep 5-minute row data, the management console can monitor more or fewer combinations. By default, the management console keeps 5-minute data for 1 month which, on average, equates to approximately 4 million new rows per day to be stored in the database.

To better understand how the management console controls database growth, consider this example:

• A group of 254 accountants are all on the same /24 network, accessing the same application hosted on a single server.
• The accountants are at work 8 hours per day, but with lunch and breaks, an accountant is actually accessing the accounting application closer to 6 hours per day.
• In this case, the management console creates approximately 18,000 rows in the database per day.
  [254 accountants x 1 application x 1 server x 6 hours x 12 rows per hour (once every 5 minutes) = 18,288 rows]

Following this example, the management console could monitor approximately 220 groups of accountants before it would become necessary to manage the size of the database.