Database Guidelines

When installing the ELM Server, you must choose an existing SQL Server on which to store the collected data. The data structure, tables, and indices will be created automatically.

Choose one of the following approaches to estimate how large your primary database will be after you start monitoring Agents and collecting event data:

Approach #1

Create a test environment with one ELM Server and one or more Agents that are typical of your enterprise.

Configure the ELM Server to collect the event data and/or performance data and reports per your requirements.

Use the ELGEN.exe utility distributed with ELM to generate the typical number of events each day.

Examine the database size every day in order to determine its size and calculate the growth over the previous day. This will give you a reasonable idea of how much data the database will be required to store per server and aid you in making decisions about how large the database server must be.

Approach #2

Use the ELMSize.exe utility to collect event data from production servers.  In the tool, take a sample of your environment such as a Domain Controller, file server, application server, or web server, and then modify the results in the tool to fit your environment.  Take the results from the tool and  multiply it by the number of systems that you plan on monitoring.

Be aware, this doesn't include any syslog data or performance data. It is difficult to determine the amount of space consumed by these items.

Sizing the ELM Server Database Hardware

Now that you know how large your database will be, the next step is to verify you have sufficient resources to run the database engine. Many hardware manufacturers include tools that can configure the appropriate hardware specifications for a server based on your answers to a few questions.