The performance of the product is largely dependent on the amount by which your hardware size meets your business needs. Therefore, before deploying IT Data Analytics, you need to plan the hardware capacity required for both installing and using the product effectively.
The hardware capacity required for the deployment depends on the size and scale of your business.
Where to find more information
Depending on your business needs you can deploy the product in a single-server environment or a multiple-server environment. Alternatively, you can start with a single-server deployment and as your business needs increase, you can scale your deployment either horizontally or vertically.
This topic contains the following hardware recommendations and guidelines that you can use as a reference to size your environment:
The hardware sizing guidelines are divided into four parts: nonproduction setups, small setups, medium setups, and large setups.
The nonproduction and small setup scenarios are recommended for a single-server deployment, while medium and large setup scenarios are recommended for a multiple-server deployment.
The following table lists the definitions of each size:
Single-server deployments are recommended for a non-production setup or small setup. In a single-server deployment, one instance of the product can handle the entire process of collecting data, indexing it, and finally making it available for search.
Hardware sizing for a single-server setup involves planning your hardware capacity and tuning the configuration of the product components. The component configurations are necessary to ensure optimal use of resources available. For more information, see Component-configuration-recommendations-for-horizontal-scaling.
Use the following hardware recommendations for a single-server deployment. These configurations apply for both Windows and Linux systems and can be carried out by using both physical and virtual processors.
Hardware recommendations for nonproduction setups
The following table lists the configurations required for a nonproduction setup with one server.
Note that this information is not intended for deploying the product in a production environment.
Notes:
- The preceding recommendation is based on tests carried out on a virtual setup using Intel® Xeon® CPU E5-2660 @ 2.20GHz processor and with a storage of 300 IOPS in the performance test lab. All the results are based on the assumption that data records collected are of the size of 200 bytes per record.
- This recommendation is for reference purposes only and is meant to be used as a guide for determining your environment-specific sizing estimates.
- The performance of the product can vary depending on the type of storage and processor used for production configurations. The higher the storage and processor configuration, the better the performance.
Hardware recommendations for small setups
For a small setup, a configuration of one server is recommended with all product components installed on that server.
The following scenarios are recommended for a small setup:
The following table lists the resource configurations required for indexing 100 GB per day, with a 14-day retention period, and with 8 concurrent users accessing the data.
The following table lists the resource configurations required for a small setup with a relatively smaller storage and more number of concurrent users. This configuration aims at indexing 50 GB per day, with a 14-day retention period, and with 16 concurrent users accessing the data.
Notes:
- The preceding recommendations are based on tests carried out on a virtual setup using Intel® Xeon® CPU E5-2660 @ 2.20GHz processor and with a storage of 300 IOPS in the performance test lab. All the results are based on the assumption that data records collected are of the size of 200 bytes per record.
- These recommendations are for reference purposes only and are meant to be used as a guide for determining your environment-specific sizing estimates.
- The performance of the product can vary depending on the type of storage and processor used for production configurations. The higher the storage and processor configuration, the better the performance.
Multiple-server deployments are recommended for medium and large setups whose scaling and sizing requirements exceed the limits of a single server.
In a multiple-server deployment, you can deploy the product components on multiple servers and then scale them to handle the following needs:
- Manage large volumes of data
- Manage large number of users accessing the data
Scaling is a process of increasing the capacity of the system to process more data or make the data accessible to multiple users without impacting the product performance. You can scale your deployment either horizontally or vertically.
Horizontal scaling involves adding more servers to the environment while vertical scaling involves adding additional resources (such as CPU, RAM, and disk space) to one server. Sometimes vertically scaling might also involve increasing the hardware capacity across more than one server.
You can choose to scale horizontally or vertically based on the resources available.
InformationRecommendation
Horizontal scaling is recommended over vertical scaling.
The following topics provide the recommended hardware sizes for scaling your deployment horizontally and vertically.
FAQs for scaling your deployment
The following FAQs can help you understand the various factors involved in scaling your deployment.
What components to scale?
The IT Data Analytics product helps you perform the following main functions:
- Data collection (handled by the Collection Station)
- Indexing (handled by the Indexer)
- Search (handled by the Search component)
Based on your needs, you can split these functions across multiple servers to handle these functions separately.
Thus, you can consider scaling the Collection Station, Indexer, and Search components.
The following topics provide the recommended deployment scenarios for scaling.
When to scale?
The following two factors are an indication that you might need to scale the Collection Station, Indexer, or Search components:
- Product performance is deteriorating
- Hardware resources such as the processor, memory, storage and disk I/O start exceeding acceptable limits.
For more information, see Indicators-for-scaling.
Which variables impact sizing and performance?
The amount by which the capacity of your system meets your business needs plays an important role in determining the performance of the system. This means the overall product performance is largely influenced by the hardware capacity available for supporting the business needs. The accuracy of your hardware sizing estimates therefore acts as a base for ensuring a smooth deployment.
The primary drivers that affect sizing are:
- Volume of data indexed per day
- Retention period (duration for which you want to store data indexed)
- Number of concurrent users likely to access or search the data indexed
For more information, see Sizing-drivers-and-their-impact.
Additionally, there are other factors that impact the product performance, for example, the number of fields defined in the data patterns, the number of tags specified in the data collectors, the number of notification set, and so on. These factors impact the resources that support the product functioning (such as processor, memory, storage) and thereby affect the product performance. The amount by which these factors impact the product performance depends on the manner in which you use the product. For more information about the list of factors and the level at which they impact performance, see Variables-that-impact-product-performance.
