Understanding Space Management |
Understanding Space ManagementAfter NFR captures all the pertinent data from your network, you need to be able to store the information in a format that will let you examine and query it at a later time. NFR provides a space management system that is designed to help you manage the data you want to store for later review. Because data storage can pose a challenge for most companies, it is necessary to assure that NFR records data within the bounds of your available, allocated disk space. The system must be able to operate normally when the system is at, or near ,capacity and an event occurs that forces space management facilities to do the right things. The space manager expires data based upon the retention criteria that you have configured. It might delete old data because a recorder is over its disk quota or it might delete data because it is too old. The space manager (also referred to as spacemand) is a persistent process that supplies different methods of dealing with the data that is due to be expired. You can turn off expiration of data for a backend, simply remove data that has exceeded a size or time threshold, copy it to another disk or send the data to be processed by an external application. Quite often you will want to further process the information that is about to be expired. You might want to generate a compressed tar file of all the day's data for a recorder or transform the data into a relational database import record format. Whatever the use, you can setup a command or command line to process your expiring data. This can be done on a backend/recorder basis. You can configure spacemand to pipe the expiring data to your command or you can have the file to be expired specified on the command line. On startup, spacemand reads the space management configuration file building a table of archived database areas to manage. It scans the databases looking to see if any files need to be removed. When a new file is created and closed, the backend creating the file sends a message to spacemand. Spacemand then checks to see if that file pushed things over the configured thresholds. This allows spacemand to be responsive during times of high traffic. |
|