104 IBM Tivoli Monitoring: Implementation and Performance Optimization for Large Scale Environments
򐂰 By using multiple monitoring servers and suspending any of them from data
collection via the Historical Data collection dialog (provided with IBM Tivoli
Monitoring Fix Pack 5)
򐂰 By using multiple Warehouse Proxies and multiple monitoring servers and
excluding any of them via configuration of the Warehouse proxy agents (fully
functional with IBM Tivoli Monitoring Fix Pack 5)
Both methods are used for decreasing the number of agents on a remote
monitoring server level. You can use both of them at the same time, and they
have an important impact on the architecture of the monitoring environment.
In the following sections we discuss both methods in more detail. In this book we
discuss large scale environments, which means thousands of agents, with
multiple monitoring servers and Warehouse Proxy agents.
4.4.1 Suspend monitoring server from the Historical Data collection
With IBM Tivoli Monitoring Fix Pack 5, you can now see the number of
monitoring servers that a particular collection has been started for. After calling
the Historical Data collection dialog box and configuring the chosen attribute
group, click the Start Collection button to start the collection. The dialog shown
in Figure 4-20 on page 105 will be displayed.
Important: You can enable historical data collection of a given agent attribute
group for a subset of your monitoring environment. Historical data collection
for a given agent type and attribute group is started at the monitoring server
level.
For example, if data collection for the Windows OS agent NT_System attribute
group is started on a monitoring server, then any Windows OS agents
connected to that monitoring server will start collecting data for the
NT_System attribute group. If there are five monitoring servers in an
environment, and data collection for the NT_System attribute group is only
started on one of the five monitoring servers, then only the agents connected
to the one monitoring server will collect historical data for the NT_System
attribute group.
Assigning agents to a monitoring server based on the historical data collection
needs is one way to minimize the amount of historical data collected in an
environment, reducing the warehouse size and lowering the processing
demands for the Warehouse Proxy agent(s) and Summarization and Pruning
agent.
Chapter 4. Planning historical data collection in large scale environments 105
Figure 4-20 Dialog for starting a Historical Data collection
In the dialog, you can select for which of the monitoring servers the data
collection will be started. This monitoring server must be selected and
transferred from the right side to the left. That means the collection will start for
the agents connected to this monitoring server.
The stopping process is similar, the monitoring server for which the collection
should be stopped must be selected and transferred to the right side. The
starting and stopping processes can be done several times. For every execution,
you can see for which monitoring server the data collection is started and for
which ones not from the dialog.
Another way to see for which monitoring server the collection is started is to slide
the mouse over the second column Collection from the respective attribute group
row. A small window will appear listing the monitoring servers, as shown in
Figure 4-21 on page 106. This column shows the number of monitoring servers
for which the data collection is started. The list can also be sorted by columns.

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