Decision 8: Whether to collect historical data and how to manage it

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Historical data collection is an optional feature that you can enable through Tivoli Enterprise Portal or the OMEGAMON enhanced 3270 user interface. When enabled, the Tivoli Enterprise Monitoring Server sends data collection requests at configured intervals to the monitoring agents, which then collect and store the requested data samples. The collected historical data can be viewed in Tivoli Enterprise Portal workspaces or the enhanced 3270 interface, warehoused for long-term analysis and reporting, used as a data source for OMEGAMON® Data Provider, and exported to third-party reporting and analytical tools.

Important: The content in this section was created for and applies to the original persistent data store, referred to as PDS V1. A new PDS version (referred to as PDS V2) now exists. PDS V1 will eventually be deprecated.

You can configure historical data collection using any of these interfaces:

Tivoli Enterprise Portal: Use the History Collection Configuration window of the Tivoli Enterprise Portal to configure and start historical data collection.
Enhanced 3270 user interface: Use the OMEGAMON History Configuration workspace to configure historical data collection.

When configuring historical collection, specify the attribute group for which you want data to be collected, the interval for data collection, the location where you want the collected data to be stored (at the monitoring server or at the agent). In the Tivoli Enterprise Portal, you can also specify whether you want the data to be migrated to the Tivoli® Data Warehouse. Note that you cannot configure data warehousing through the enhanced 3270UI, nor can you configure summarization and pruning. Only a subset of attributes can be configured and displayed in the enhanced 3270UI.

On z/OS® systems, historical data is stored in data sets maintained by the persistent data store. If you enable historical data collection during configuration, space is allocated for the data sets. Persistent data store maintenance options should also be configured.

Important: The Tivoli Enterprise Portal displays only 24 hours of data from the persistent data store data sets (short-term history). Data older than 24 hours is taken from the Tivoli Data Warehouse (long-term history). So to display more than 24 hours of data in the portal, you must configure data warehousing. The enhanced 3270UI can display as much data as is stored in the persistent data store (near-term history). However, the enhanced 3270UI cannot display data from the Tivoli Data Warehouse and you cannot configure the Warehouse Proxy and Summarization Pruning agents from the enhanced 3270UI.

Historical data collection consumes CPU and storage, so it is important to plan data collection carefully. Consider the following planning decisions before you begin to configure historical data collection and storage: