I have been working in IT since 2001 for companies such as Computacenter and Getronics. I started out as a first line support analyst supporting heterogeneous networks but rapidly worked my way up the ranks expanding my knowledge as I went to include areas such as system builds, deployments, networking, and security to name a few.In 2008 I decided to concentrate on the monitoring and management of large enterprise networks using Microsoft's System Center Operations Manager (OpsMgr) 2007 of which I have extensive knowledge. As testament to this the Windows Management User Group (WMUG), invited me to join their ranks as a Community Leader where I have been invaluable in helping to bolster the OpsMgr skills to the benefit of the group and it's members.I have now moved into an OpsMgr 2007 consultancy role to do what I like most - working with OpsMgr and sharing my knowledge and experiences with the community.
We all know filling up databases is generally not a good idea as you can corrupt or lose data but there is another good reason as to why should not fill your ACS database. Letting your ACS database fill up will not just affect ACS, it will affect both your Ops DB and Ops DW which in turn will have a negative impact on usability and performance within Operations Manager.
At first glance you wouldn’t expect the ACS database to have anything to do with your Ops DB and DW, and directly it doesn’t but OpsMgr manages ACS and it is this that causes all the problems. When the ACS database fills up, nothing more can be inserted into it and when this happens loads of AdtServer events are created in the OperationsManager log advising that data could not be inserted as the DB is full. This itself isn’t a problem, however what is a problem is that there is a rule within Operations Manager (that is enabled by default) that collects all AdtServer events.
Due to the huge number of AdtServer events that get published into the log when the ACS DB runs out of space, this event collection rule gets very busy collecting all these event entries and placing them into the Ops DB and DW which then causes both these databases to excessively grow. In the proof of concept I was working on I was only collecting ACS data from two servers when the ACS DB ran out of space and this generated so many AdtServer events that both the Ops DB and then DW ran out of space very quickly. These databases were also set to autogrow but with over 1,000,000 events being collected over a week, this disk the database files were on ran out of space so this is definitely something to be aware of.
The rule that is the cause of this problem is, Microsoft Audit Collection Services Collector Event Collection Rule.
Merry Christmas all, David.