System Health and Maintenance › Maintenance Tasks › Purge Data from the Database

Purge Data from the Database

During normal operation, Multi-Port Monitor performs routine maintenance on the database and file systems. Routine maintenance includes purging data and files of various types. Typically, raw packet capture files are retained for six hours before being purged. Files containing performance metrics from 1-minute intervals are retained for one week before being purged.

You can manually purge the Multi-Port Monitor database for several reasons:

• The Database Status page reveals a problem.
• Statistics on the System Status page indicate that file systems are nearly full.
• You receive an mpcDiskUsage SNMP trap indicating that disk usage exceeds a threshold.

Important: Purged data is permanently removed from the database. You cannot recover purged data.

Follow these steps:

1. Click Administration, Purge Data in the web interface.

   The Purge Data page opens.

2. Select "Purge all data and metric database tables" to remove all data and database tables.

   This option stops the processes that collect data. No new data is collected until you restart the processes.

   When you select this option, all other options on the page are unavailable.

3. Select at least one of the following options to remove only selected data. Processes continue to run and new data is still collected.
   • Purge one-minute session metrics. Removes the 1-minute session metrics from the metrics database.
   • Purge raw capture files. Removes packet capture files. These files are continually generated during ordinary monitoring and are used to derive performance statistics. The default is 6.
   • Purge packet capture investigations. Removes files from packet capture investigations. Investigation files are stored separately from raw capture files. The default is 90.
   • Purge log files. Removes the log files that Multi-Port Monitor creates.
4. Select the time frame for removing the data that you selected in step 3.
   • Purge across all dates. Removes data of the selected type, regardless of the time frame.
   • Purge prior to this date. Removes the data that was collected before the date you specify.

     Note: Data is stored in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). This option removes data that was collected before midnight UTC. When you view data using the local time, it may seem as though some data still exists for the previous day.

5. Click OK.
6. Restart the processes that were stopped if you purged all data as described in step 2.

More information:

Set Global Preferences

Database Status

System Status

Create SNMP Traps