= Overview of Operational Monitoring =

The monitoring architecture is based on the concept of distributing sources of information in a common fashion.  The sources of information (relational data or time-series data) is placed into what are called "Local Datastores".  These datastores have a common REST polling API for retrieving information.  The component that automatically retrieves data from the Local Datastores are called "Aggregators". 

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  <caption align="bottom"> <b> Architectural Highlight of an Aggregator and a Local Datastore </b></caption>
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An aggregator can poll a variety of datastores and any subset of data within each datastore.  A monitoring application relies on an aggregators for its data queries, so aggregators poll whatever data is necessary to have sufficient data to support the attached monitoring applications (i.e., alerting, reporting, historical analysis, visualization).  

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  <caption align="bottom"> <b> Monitoring Architecture </b></caption>
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Although there are multiple aggregators, a single monitoring application uses only a single aggregator.