Why is it important to reduce the size of my SCOM Data Warehouse?
A company’s data warehouse is usually the largest database a company uses when dealing with SCOM data, this means it is often the most expensive to manage and maintain. They can also be a drain on your infrastructure, taking a long time to backup, slowing down reporting, consuming more hardware space and can be very time consuming to recover, if they go down.
Typically a SCOM DW database is setup to overwrite old data when it gets to capacity, so choosing to store more data each day will result in being able to store fewer days worth of data. To be able to store more days data you have two choices: store less data each day or increase database size.
That’s why it is so important to keep your data warehouse in good shape and only store the data you actually need, as it will end up costing you storage space and time in maintenance.
Typically, the data sets that are consuming most of the space are: Alert, Event, Performance and State data.
So, if you reduce these, then you will be well on your way to minimizing the size of your SCOM data warehouse.
How can I reduce the size of my SCOM Data Warehouse?
Below is a list of typical actions (note these might be different if your environment is unique):
Only keep the data you need - if you are not required to report on data older than 60 days, why store 100 days worth of data?
Performance collection typically runs hourly, in some cases or where reports span a long period of time, consider reducing the collection frequency to daily.
Most people don’t use events in reports at all, so why store them for the default 100 days? (or in some cases, at all).
Most people don’t do a lot of state reporting beyond 30 days, so these too can be discarded sooner.
If you don’t look at alerts from specific workflows, why bother generating them? tune out rules and monitors that generate alerts that your organisation doesn’t need.
There are several ways to put these recommendations into action, depending on how much time, budget and skill you have to perform this task.
1) Administrative Commands
There are a few administrative tasks you can perform to do this yourself, involving commands, SQL and scripts. To find out how to do this we highly recommend taking a look at Kevin Holman’s blog on Understanding and Modifying Data Warehouse Retention and Grooming.
This will give you a great start on your journey to managing and minimizing the size of your data warehouse, but it can be fairly time consuming, and does not provide the most flexible or sophisticated method of managing this process going forwards.
2) The SCOM Console
You can of course use the SCOM console to fine tune SCOM, but if you’ve ever been tasked with manually implementing SCOM overrides you will appreciate how long this task can take (we’re talking days not hours!). Never fear there is a fast, effective and free solution – Easy Tune.
3) Cookdown Easy Tune
Easy Tune will help you tune SCOM in just a few clicks, to reduce alert noise that would otherwise end up in your data warehouse.
We recently set up an alert tuning experiment to time how long it would take to tune SCOM natively from the console vs. Easy Tune and there was no competition…
…Easy Tune is 98.4% faster, requires 93% fewer clicks and the tuning wizard (UI) makes it super simple to use!
Once you’ve successfully tuned SCOM, you’ll enjoy the following benefits (as well as reduced SCOM DW storage requirements):
· Reduction in alert noise as you can tune down or turn off non-essential monitoring.
· Customize your tuning to compliment your business activities, using our Alert Scheduling Tool.
For hints and tips on how to find those items which are consuming the most space in your data warehouse and how to tune these up to save resources, read our blog on Tuning to Save Resources or to get started straight away simply click here for a free download of Easy Tune.
4) Monitoring & Maintaining Your Data Warehouse
Once you have done all this hard work you will want to make sure your data warehouse remains in tip-top condition. Below are a couple of free community resources from Tao Yang to help you do just that: