The monitoring device ratio varies by environment and depends on what you configure the management console to monitor. In particular, the number of client networks tends to have a significant impact on the amount of data produced.
If you are evaluating the management console, use the daily database growth rate (see page 213) from the evaluation to estimate the daily database row growth for production.
Keep in mind that on average, with default data retention settings, the management console can create up to 4 million rows per day. Under some conditions, a CA Multi-Port Monitor can generate 4 million rows per day, especially if the number of client networks is large. If the daily database row growth rate exceeds the threshold, the management console automatically manages the size of the database.
The processing load that is created by adding a monitoring device to the management console is expressed as a
monitoring unit
. For example, a CA Standard Monitor utilizes one monitoring unit. The management console supports up to 15 monitoring units.
| The following list summarizes the equivalent processing load, in monitoring units, for each type of monitoring device: Monitoring Device | Monitoring Units |
| CA Multi-Port Monitor | 5 |
| CA Standard Monitor | 1 |
| CA Virtual Systems Monitor | .5 (tier-to-tier traffic on the ESX host) |
| CA GigaStor | 1 monitoring unit per 1 Gbps of SPAN |
| Cisco WAE (up to 50,000 optimized connections) | 1 |
| Cisco NAM-2 Blade (1 Gbps maximum) | 1 |
| Cisco NAM 2204 Appliance (2 Gbps maximum) | 2 |
| Cisco NAM 2220 Appliance (5 Gbps maximum) | 5 |
Without any information about daily database growth, you can estimate that a management console can support one of the following monitoring device configurations:
■
30 CA Virtual Systems Monitor monitoring devices monitoring server-server traffic on an ESX host
■
3 CA Multi-Port Monitor appliances
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10 Cisco NAM-2 blades and 1 CA Multi-Port Monitor
■
5 CA GigaStor appliances