One of the biggest challenges with monitoring data is managing the volume over time. Lots of bespoke/home-grown solutions don’t do this well, and some commercial products have a gross approach that might not meet your needs.
Customers constantly ask me about this, so here’s a quick tip on how you can manage data retention in Redgate Monitor.
This is part of a series of posts on Redgate Monitor. Click to see the other posts.
Checking the Configuration
As with most things in Redgate Monitor, this is a config item. In your Redgate Monitor solution (or on the public demo site), you can find the configuration gear icon in the upper right.
Click this and you get to the settings page. Scroll down to the Preferences area and there is a Data retention settings link. Click that.
You will get to the Data retention settings page (public site), which has a few sections at the top. You will be setting this per Base Monitor, using the drop down at the top.
Scroll below these to the data retention section, which you see at the bottom:
In this section, you see quite a few different sections. I’m showing the trend data below.
There are sections for
- trend data- long term data for understanding how performance and baselines work
- performance troubleshooting data – query, waits, plan, etc. data
Each of these sections is described, along with where the data is displayed. You can see that in the image above.
To the right of these, are the retention settings. I’ve got an image of the first few items. You can see the time for which to retain data and then the current size of that data.
You can set a fairly granular level of retention for data here, broken out by the various data elements we capture.
The choices for retention are shown below, including indefinitely (be careful of this one).
We have this documented, along with what we think are good defaults on this page. For example, we keep top query data for only one week, since this is a lot of data. However, if you want more time, then set it to something that works for you.
Summary
Data management is always a challenge, both in production databases and in our monitoring systems. Redgate Monitor gives you lots of choices, and those can vary by Base Monitor, so if you have a BM in the cloud doing some stuff and one on premise doing other things, you can set separate retention settings. That can be handy, especially when the cost of storing things can vary dramatically.
Watch this over time and adjust settings as needed to keep your system performing optimally.
Redgate Monitor is a world class monitoring solution for your database estate. Download a trial today and see how it can help you manage your estate more efficiently.
