Historical polled data collection and storage tasks

Use this information to learn about some of the tasks that network administrators and network operators perform that relate to historical polled data collection and storage.

Configuring a collection of historical polled data

Network administrators who engage in a carefully thought out historical polling data collection and storage strategy can provide a better understanding of behavior trends associated with throughput rates, device CPU and memory resources, interface usage, errors, discards, and so on. For example, such a strategy could allow network administrators to closely monitor:

  • Problematic or key network devices after a maintenance period
  • An area of the network where there are suspected problems

Network administrators use the Network Polling GUI to configure a collection of historical polled data, which typically consists of the following tasks:

  • Defining the specific SNMP and ICMP data to collect, including threshold triggers for alerts
  • Defining the scope and time interval for polling
  • Determining what SNMP and ICMP data to store
  • Starting the data collection

Running performance reports using historical polled data

Network administrators and operators can access historical polled data reports by accessing the Cognos Analytics section of Network Manager and running performance reports, or by issuing a right-click command on a selected device in a topology map.

Specifically, network administrators and operators can use the Cognos Analytics to:

  • View sets of defined reports detailing trends and analysis based on SNMP and ICMP short term historical data collections for a subset of the collected data
  • View generic Trend and TopN graphs of ad hoc collections of stored data

The TopN reports can help compare and focus on the right network devices and drill down to see patterns over time. Summarization reports can help extend the time period for which to compare performance results. The default reports can be used as examples to create custom reports.

Managing storage limits for historical polled data

Network administrators manage the storage rates for historical polled data to ensure optimum report response times and to allow the performance data reports to display a greater amount of historical data.

Storing Poll Data for DB2 and Oracle

You can enable the poller to store the floating point, 64-bit integer, and 32-bit integer values of the polled data.

In the following table, modify the value column type to DECFLOAT for Db2:
    * ncpolldata.polldata
	* ncpolldata.pdEWMAForDay
	* ncpolldata.pdEWMAForWeek
	* ncpolldata.pdEWMAForMonth
	* ncpolldata.pdEWMAForYear
In the following table, modify the value column type to BINARY_DOUBLE for Oracle:
    * ncpolldata.polldata
	* ncpolldata.pdEWMAForDay
	* ncpolldata.pdEWMAForWeek
	* ncpolldata.pdEWMAForMonth
	* ncpolldata.pdEWMAForYear