Where to collect data

Historical data can be stored as short-term data either at the monitoring agent or at the monitoring server to which the agent reports. Where you decide to collect the data determines what steps you take to configure the persistent data store.

Best practices

Two OMEGAMON® XE monitoring agents (OMEGAMON for z/OS® and OMEGAMON for Storage on z/OS) must be configured within the address space of a monitoring server. Therefore, any historical data collection for these agents must also be stored at the monitoring server. For all other agents, whenever possible configure historical data to be collected and stored at the monitoring agent rather than at the monitoring server.

Tip: For best performance, avoid collecting historical data at the hub. See IBM Tivoli Monitoring: Administrator's Guide for details.
If an agent is configured to run in the monitoring server address space, like OMEGAMON for z/OS and OMEGAMON for Storage on z/OS, the persistent data store is configured in two locations:
  • During configuration of the monitoring server, the generic persistent data store (RPDSGRP) is configured and the generic data sets (RGENHIS*) are allocated.
  • During configuration of the OMEGAMON monitoring agent, product-specific historical data sets are allocated.

If a monitoring agent runs in its own address space (stand-alone), and you intend to collect historical data only at the location of the monitoring agent, you can configure the persistent data store during configuration of the agent only. However, to ensure that you have flexibility to collect data at the monitoring server at some later date, configure the persistent data store at the location of the monitoring server as well. If you have no monitoring server in the runtime environment, configuring the persistent data store for the monitoring agent allocates the generic data sets as well as the private data sets.

Data can be uploaded to the Tivoli Data Warehouse for long-term storage and reporting. However, warehoused data can only be viewed using the Tivoli Enterprise Portal. Data warehousing is configured in the Historical Data Collection window of the Tivoli Enterprise Portal. See the IBM Tivoli Monitoring: Installation and Setup Guide for instructions on setting up the Tivoli Data Warehouse and the Warehouse Proxy and Summarization and Pruning agents. See the IBM Tivoli Monitoring: Administrator's Guide for instructions on configuring data warehousing.