Classification Module 6.1.1 - What's New

Resource Activity Compression Utility

Resource activity tracking is available for locally managed Windows servers, SharePoint farms, and supported NetApp and EMC remotely managed hosts. It is used to collect data on identities, reads, writes, creates, deletes, renames and security changes on securable objects. This information is required for several report types, including the Resource Activity report. The Data Governance activity database stores resource activity information.

To ensure that activity data remains manageable and usable administrators need a way to control the growth of activity in their database. For managed hosts with Resource Activity enabled, you can exclude selected accounts, file extensions, and folders, to be scanned by agents depending on the type of managed host. For example, you can select to exclude service accounts as their activity typically would not require tracking. (For details, see the Data Governance Edition User Guide section on Adding Managed Hosts and managing exclusions).

The Activity Compression utility can also be used to further manage the database. It enables the compression of activity from multiple rows into a single row in the database.

Additional Notes

Best Practices

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Before using this utility ensure that you: Backup the activity database and transaction log. This clears completed transactions from the transaction log file to free space for new transaction generated by running the utility. For additional information, refer to Books Online for SQL Server - Transaction log backups.

The utility will change the SQL Server recovery model to bulk-logged model. This ensures that the transaction log will not grow too large, using up available disk space, while the utility is running.

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While running the utility: The utility can compress activity data while managed hosts, with activity turned on, continue to monitoring changes. However, it will run faster if activity is turned off on all managed hosts. When you specify a large compression granularity (such as 1 year) the utility may use a large percentage of the SQL Servers resources and there is a risk of the SQL commands timing out. To prevent this, stage the compression by first running with a compression granularity of 1 week and then running the utility again specifying a compression granularity of 1 year.

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Once you have run the utility: If bulk-logged recovery model is not suitable for your recovery model, change the database recovery model to either simple or full recovery model. See Books Online for SQL Server – Change recovery model. If the database size and log size are still too large, backup the database again to clear completed transactions from the log file and then execute “DBCC SHRINKDATABASE” on the database to shrink the database and log to the correct size. For more information, see Books Online for SQL Server – DBCC SHRINKDATABASE.

Installation

The ActivityCompression utility is a console program.

To install the utility

1.	Copy the ActivityCompression utility to the database server or a member server.

2.	Open a command prompt and enter ActivityCompression to see usage instructions.

Using the ActivityCompression Utility

ActivityCompression

[-ConnectionString] <'String'>

[[-RemainUncompressed] <integer>]

[[-CompressionGranularity] <integer>]

[[-DatabasePlatformOracle] <string>]

-connectionString: The string used to connect to the database.

Example: SQL Server Authentication

-ConnectionString ""Data Source=myServerAddress; Initial Catalog=myDatabase; User Id=myUser; Password=myPassword""

Example: Windows Authentication

-ConnectionString ""Server=myServerAddress;Database=myDatabase;Trusted_Connection=True""

Example: Oracle

-ConnectionString "Direct=True;Server=myServer;Sid=mySid;User Id=myUser;Password=myPassword"

-DatabasePlatformOracle: The database platform used for the activity database. If not specified, this defaults to SQL Server.

Example: SQL Server platform

-DatabasePlatformOracle false

Example: Oracle platform

-DatabasePlatformOracle true

- RemainUncompressed: The amount of time (in days) that will remain uncompressed. By default, this utility will compress all but the 7 days from the current date time. This allows the newest activity in the database to remain uncompressed for more in depth analysis.

Example: -RemainUncompressed 7

- CompressionGranularity: The amount of time (in days, default 7 days) to compress the fine grain activity entries to. If your database is configured with daily activity granularity, setting -CompressionGranularity to 7 will compress all activity within those seven existing timespans into a single timespan with the similar activity over the seven days compressed into single records.

Example: -CompressionGranularity 7

Examples

Compress all Activity to a 7 day granularity

ConnectionString "Server=myServerAddress;Database=myDatabase; Trusted_Connection=True" -RemainUncompressed 0 -CompressionGranularity 7

Compress all but the 30 days from current time to a 7 day granularity

-ConnectionString "Server=myServerAddress;Database=myDatabase;Trusted_Connection=True" -RemainUncompressed 10 -CompressionGranularity 7

Compress all but the 7 days from current time to a 7 day granularity (Oracle)

-ConnectionString "Direct=True;Server=myServer;Sid=mySid;User Id=myUser;Password=myPassword" -RemainUncompressed 7 -CompressionGranularity 7 -DatabasePlatformOracle true

Notes on running the utility

•	The first compression is the most resource intensive. Once the initial compression is completed, future scheduled compressions take a fraction of the time to complete.

•	As the number of managed hosts increases, the processing time per record will also increase. This may cause large deployment of 1000+ managed hosts to take a week or more to complete the initial compression.

•	The recommended maximum “CompressionGranularity” on the first compression is seven days. This number may be higher depending on the specifications of the SQL server.

•	You can run the compression utility in a production environment. However, we recommend scheduling this process to run on a weekly basis.

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You may run the compression multiple times to create differing levels of detail the further back in time you go. Assume a batch file running the compression three times with the following settings: -CompressionGranularity 7 –RemainUncompressed 7 -CompressionGranularity 30 –RemainUncompressed 30 -CompressionGranularity 365 –RemainUncompressed 365 The first run will compress the activity into week long blocks, keeping the most recent week uncompressed. The second run will then further compress the database, compressing activity older than 30 days into month long blocks. The final compression run will compress anything older than 365 days into year time blocks. This will ensure that the most recent activity can be examined at a very detailed level while summing older activity to keep the database size reasonable.

•	If you experience timeouts, reduce the CompressionGranularity to one day. Compress further from there. This timeout does not cause any data issues, but it does interrupt the compression and it will need to be run again.

Documentation on QuestBook

Quest One Identity Manager Data Governance Edition documentation is now available online at http://documents.quest.com. This site provides robust search capabilities that allow you to search across all related documents.