Measurements

The measurements framework allows applications to define, update, and produce reports for various measurements.

• Measurements are ordinary counters that count occurrences of different events within the system, for example, the number of messages received. Measurement counters are also called pegs. Additional measurement types provided by the Platform framework are not used in this release.
• Applications simply peg (increment) measurements upon the occurrence of the event that needs to be measured.
• Measurements are collected and merged at the SOAM and NOAM servers as appropriate.
• The GUI allows reports to be generated from measurements.

Measurements that are being pegged locally are collected from shared memory and stored in a disk-backed database table every 5 minutes on all servers in the network. Measurements are collected every 5 minutes on a 5 minute boundary; for example, at HH:00, HH:05, HH:10, HH:15, and so on. The collection frequency is set to 5 minutes to minimize the loss of measurement data in case of a server failure, and also to minimize the impact of measurements collection on system performance.

All servers in the network (NOAM, SOAM, and MP servers) store a minimum of 8 hours of local measurements data. More than 5 minutes of local measurements data is retained on each server to minimize loss of measurements data in case of a network connection failure to the server merging measurements.

Measurements data older than the required retention period are deleted by the measurements framework.

Measurements are reported in groups. A measurements report group is a collection of measurement IDs. Each measurement report contains one measurement group. A measurement can be assigned to one or more existing or new measurement groups so that it is included in a measurement report. Assigning a measurement ID to a report group ensures that when you select a report group the same set of measurements is always included in the measurements report.

Note:

Measurements from a server may be missing in a report if the server is down; the server is in overload; something in the Platform merging framework is not working; or the report is generated before data is available from the last collection period (there is a 25 to 30 second lag time in availability).