Distributing a historical collection

Distribute a historical collection definition to the managed systems that you want to save data samples from. Data collection begins as soon as you save the distribution. Edit the distribution list whenever you want to start or stop historical sampling on certain managed systems or managed system groups.

1. If the History Collection Configuration window is not open, click History Configuration, click the Monitored Application, then click the historical collection definition that you want to distribute.
2. Click the Distribution tab and select the distribution method:
   • Managed System (Agent) to select managed systems and managed system groups individually. You can also add the collection definition to a historical configuration group to adopt the group's distribution.
   • Managing System (TEMS) to select all the agents that connect to this monitoring server. This method makes the collection ineligible for inclusion in a historical configuration group.
   In the following example, if you chose distribution by managed system (agent), you could select any of the agents to distribute the collection to; if you chose distribution by managing system (TEMS), selecting the East Tivoli Enterprise Monitoring Server distributes the collection to the 1, 2, and 4 agents and you cannot remove any of them or add agents from the West monitoring server.
   

   Available Systems shows the monitoring agents or monitoring servers for assignment and Available Managed System Groups shows the available managed system groups. You can click Edit Managed System Groups to open the Object Group editor for creating and editing managed system groups.

3. If you selected Managing System (TEMS), select the monitoring server whose managed systems you want to start collecting data for, andmove to the Start collection on list.
4. If you selected Managed System (Agent), distribute to the managed systems where you want to start data collection:
   • Assign managed systems to the collection: Select from the Available Systems or Available Managed System Groups list, then move to the Start collection on list. Distribution to an individual historical collection is useful when the managed system assignments vary for each collection definition.
   • Assign managed systems to a historical configuration group for the collection definition. Distribution to a historical group is useful when the distribution is the same for multiple collection definitions.
     1. Click Group.
     2. Click Create a new object group; or click Update an existing object group if a historical group has already been created that this collection can become a member of.
     3. In the Members tab, select a historical collection from the list of Available Members and move it to the Assigned Members list.
     4. In the Distributions tab, select the managed systems and managed system groups to assign to the historical configuration group. Select a managed system group to see its constituent objects in the Selected Assigned Object Members or Selected Available Object Members list.
     5. Click OK to save the historical group and return to the Historical Collection Configuration window.
     The distribution from the historical configuration group (or groups) that the collection belongs to is shown in the Start collection on list; the entries are dimmed to indicate that they were assigned through a historical configuration group and cannot be changed from here. You can right-click a dimmed entry and click Show Groups to see the historical groups it belongs to.
5. Click Apply to save the collection definition and start data collection on the managed systems.

Results

The collection shows in the tree as distributed to indicate that data collection is taking place on the assigned managed systems.

What to do next

Click the monitored application name in the tree and, in the right frame, find the attribute group for the collection that you just configured. The attribute group is prefixed with a Data collection started icon.

If the collection definition has a warehouse interval, you need to configure summarization and pruning for the attribute group if you have not already done so.

After historical data samples have been saved to the short-term history files, you can create query-based views and select a time span of historical data to display.

After data collection has begun, the Distribution method radio buttons are disabled. If you want to enable them to change the distribution method, you must first remove the current distributions as described in the topic, "Changing the Distribution Method".