Reducing passive monitor records

The PassiveMonitorActivityLog table stores Passive Monitor data collected by SNMP Trap, Syslog, and Windows Event Log monitoring.

When WhatsUp Gold collects large quantities of unnecessary or unwanted passive monitor data, a very large table can result.

1. Verify Passive Monitor Listener configuration.
   The first step is to ensure you are only collecting data for passive monitors you have explicitly configured for your devices. To do this, ensure that for the both the SNMP Trap Listener and the Syslog Listener, you are not accepting unsolicited messages. You can verify this configuration in Program Options.
   
   To verify Passive Monitor Listener configuration:
   1. From the main menu of the WhatsUp Gold console, select Configure > Program Options. The Program Options dialog appears.
   2. Click Passive Monitor Listeners. The Program Options - Passive Monitor Listeners dialog appears.
   3. Select SNMP Trap, then click Configure. The SNMP Listener Configuration dialog appears.
   4. Ensure that Accept unsolicited SNMP Traps is not selected, then click OK. The Program Options - Passive Monitor Listeners dialog appears.
   5. Select Syslog, then click Configure. The Syslog Listener Configuration dialog appears.
   6. Ensure that Accept unsolicited passive monitors is not selected, then click OK. The Program Options - Passive Monitor Listeners dialog appears.
   7. Click OK to exit Program Options.
      
2. Remove unnecessary data from the database
   After you configure WhatsUp Gold to collect data from only passive monitors that are assigned to devices, the next step is to clear the unneeded data already collected from the database.
   This can be done in one of two ways.
   The fastest way is to remove all passive monitor data collected by the application. This removes all passive monitor data that appears in the SNMP Trap Log, Syslog Entries, and Windows Event Log reports. Any actions triggered by an incoming passive monitor event will still appear in the Action Log.

   Important: We recommend making a backup of your WhatsUp Gold database should you need to reverse any of the following changes.

To remove all passive monitor data from the WhatsUp database:

1. Stop all Ipswitch services and applications:
   • Ipswitch WhatsUp Engine
   • Ipswitch Web Server$WhatsUp
   • Ipswitch Discovery
   • Ipswitch Alert Center
   • Ipswitch Flow Collector
2. From a command prompt on the WhatsUp Gold computer, execute the following case-sensitive command on a single line: >sqlcmd -E -S "%COMPUTERNAME%\WHATSUP" -Q "TRUNCATE TABLE [WhatsUp].[dbo].[PassiveMonitorActivityLog]"

Note: Replace %COMPUTERNAME% with the name of the WhatsUp Gold computer.

The command listed above assumes you are using the SQL Server 2008 Express Edition database that is installed with WhatsUp Gold. If you are using an alternate database configuration, contact your database administrator to determine what information should be included with the "-S" switch.

After you have removed all the Passive Monitor data from the WhatsUp database, you can optionally shrink the WhatsUp database files to reclaim disk space on the SQL server.

To shrink the WhatsUp Gold database:

1. Ensure that all of the Ipswitch service and applications listed above are still stopped.
2. From a command prompt on the WhatsUp computer, execute the following case-sensitive command on a single line:
   >sqlcmd -E -S "%COMPUTERNAME%\WHATSUP" -Q "DBCC SHRINKDATABASE ('WhatsUp', 20)"

Note: Replace %COMPUTERNAME% with the name of the WhatsUp Gold computer.

The database shrink could take quite some time depending on the size of the database and system resources, but reports a short database space analysis after completion.

Note: You can abort the shrink process at any time by using the [CTRL] + [C] keystroke sequence.

More information on the "DBCC SHRINKDATABASE" command can be found on Microsoft's web site at:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms190488.aspx

Important: After you reclaiming database space, you should examine your passive monitors' configuration. You can do this easily by viewing the the Total Passive Monitors by Type dashboard report (available on any Home dashboard), and the system-level SNMP Trap Log, Syslog Entries, and Windows Event Log reports. If you have passive monitors assigned to "talkative" devices, or you have monitors which are not exclusive enough in their search criteria assigned to your WhatsUp devices, you may re-encounter this problem as more passive monitor data is collected by the system.