Improving Systems Performance › Performance Architecture › Data Accessibility and Management by the Performance Data Grid

Data Accessibility and Management by the Performance Data Grid

With each Systems Performance domain capable of supporting up to 100,000 monitored servers and workstations, there is a critical need for a mechanism that provides fast and reliable access to the vast amount of performance data that may potentially be gathered over time. In particular, it is important that the data held in performance cubes across the enterprise:

• Can be summarized and stored in the Management Database (MDB) so that you can correlate it with your organizational assets and other management data.
• Is readily accessible to management and analysis applications that need performance data.
• Is reliably marshaled and stored in a highly scalable way, but is centralized enough to support easy data management and recovery.
• Can easily have data management rules applied so that you can age and aggregate the data as it gets older.
• Can be changed into a form that has greater business relevance, such as "health" indexes, workload‑based or application‑based metrics, and customized metrics that you yourself can create.

The Performance Data Grid (PDG) in CA NSM Systems Performance (r11 and above) provides all these capabilities and more. In essence, the PDG lets you obtain performance information that covers any time period and at virtually any degree of granularity for any managed element in your enterprise (device, server, application, and more).

The PDG is formed from a network of orthogonal, distributed Performance Distribution Servers that form a grid to service data requests. This grid creates a single image of the performance data for the entire enterprise and grants you seamless access to the data. A notable feature of this design is that you do not need to know where the data you are requesting is physically stored, or which end-point is servicing the request; you simply place a query on the grid and obtain a response.