Backing up the application diagnostic database

The following topics provide recommendations for database administration and link to instructions on the MySQL website:

• • Backing up the existing database
  • Recovering database data
  • Configuring data retention
  • Optimizing database tables

Backing up the existing database

BMC recommends that you make a physical backup of the database data files. The output of a physical backup contains data files that the MySQL server can use directly, resulting in a faster recovery operation.

To create a database backup file

1. On the computer with the BMC Application Diagnostics Server component (Portal or Collector), navigate to serverInstallationDirectory\collector\bin\db
2. Run the following script:
   
   • (Windows) create-mysql-dump.bat
   • (Linux) ./create-mysql-dump.sh

The script creates a backup of the data in the ad-mysql-dump.sql file.

For more information about making MySQL backup files, see Database Backup Methods.

Recovering database data

In case of a database issue, you can recover the backed up data file.

To recover the backed up data file

1. On the computer with the BMC Application Diagnostics Server component (Portal or Collector), navigate to the following directory, according to your system:
   
   • (Windows)  serverInstallationDirectory\ADOP_DB\bin
   • (Linux)  serverInstallationDirectory/ADOP_DB/mysql-5.6.14-m2-linux-x86_64-glibc23/bin

2. Run the following command:

   mysql -u root -p -h localhost < ad-mysql-dump.sql
3. Enter the MySQL root user password.

The database data is recovered.

For more information about how to recover the database data, see recovering a database.

Configuring data retention

Data retention is set during installation of the BMC Application Diagnostics Collector. You can change the data retention configuration anytime by changing the values of the following properties in the collector.properties file:

• retention.time — The period of time, in days, to retain data in the database
• db.max.size — The maximum size of the database in megabytes (MB). Default: 100000MB = 100GB

Optimizing database tables

To re-index database tables, use the optimize tables script. Due to the way in which BMC Application Diagnostics works with the database, you rarely need to run this script. You should run it only if performance degrades and analysis shows that the reason is fragmented indexes.