FRAMEWORK FOR PROVIDING METRICS FROM ANY DATASOURCE

• US 20080270369A1
• Filed: 04/26/2007
• Published: 10/30/2008
• Est. Priority Date: 04/26/2007
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
• Inventors: Justus, Darren C., Moon, Carroll W., Pallini, Susan, Luniya, Jitendra, Myerson, Neal R.
• Granted Patent: US 8,234,240 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 707/4
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/254 Extract, transform and load [ETL] procedures, e.g. ETL data flows in data warehouses

Abstract

A metrics generation system provides IT and other computing system metrics from different data sources in a single display. Configuration files containing parameters and instructions are loaded by the system to access different data sources. The metrics generation system retrieves IT system health data, processes and aggregates metrics from the retrieved data and displays the metrics based on user defined parameters and instructions in the configuration files. The metrics generation system is flexible in that it can be changed to extract data from different IT data sources, calculate different metric information having a hierarchy of attribute types and values, and display a variety of metric data in different formats.

Claims

1. A method for providing a metric, comprising:

receiving one or more configuration files by a staging database, the staging database having a schema for loading extracted data from two or more data stores having different schema and for storing metric data having a hierarchical structure, at least one of the one or more configuration files includes server extraction parameters;

generating a unique query by the staging database for each of a first server and a second server based on the server extraction parameters, the first server and second server having a different communication interface and associated with different server extraction parameters;

sending the first unique query to the first server and the second unique query to the second server by the presentation database;

receiving a first response with a first data from the first server and a second response with a second data from the second server; and

storing the first data in a first set of tables and the second data in a second set of tables, the first and second set of tables having the schema for loading extracted data and located within the staging database.

2. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

providing a presentation database for aggregating the first data and the second data at each level of a hierarchy associated with each metric;

providing a data set generation module for packaging selected portions of the data into a package for display; and

providing a display application for accessing the selected portions of data from the data package and displaying the selected portions.

3. The method of claim 1, wherein said step of generating a unique query includes:

generating an extraction task based on the one or more configuration files; and

performing the extraction task by a staging database in communication with the first server and the second server.

4. The method of claim 1, wherein said step of generating a unique query includes:

determining a number of servers specified in the one or more configuration files, the servers including the first server and second server; and

generating a query for each of the servers specified in the one or more configuration tasks.

5. The method of claim 1, wherein said step of storing includes:

retrieving a data value and time data from the first response; and

loading the data value and time data into a table.

6. The method of claim 1, wherein said step of storing includes:

generating an inbound data table in a staging database from the one or more configuration files; and

loading the first data from the first response into the inbound table.

7. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

calculating metric data from the stored first data and second data, the calculations determined from the one or more configuration files; and

storing the metric data in a plurality of tables based on the one or more configuration tables.

8. The method of claims 7, wherein said step of calculating metric data includes:

associating one or more attributes with each generated metric, the one or more attributes also associated with at least one of the first data and the second data used to generate the metric.

9. The method of claim 8, further comprising:

transmitting the metric data to a presentation database; and

aggregating the metric data with respect to each metric attribute at the presentation database.

10. The method of claim 9, further comprising:

displaying the aggregated metric data for one or more metric attributes.

13. The system of claim 11, wherein the system is used to generate metrics to determine the health of an information technology system, wherein the hierarchy attributes define a an attribute type defined by a user, each metric associated with attribute values for each type that are provided by a user.

11. A system for processing data, comprising:

a staging database that receives configuration files, loads extraction parameters and metric parameters from the configuration files, extracts data from one or more data sources based on the extraction parameters, and generates metrics based on the metric parameters;

a presentation database that receives metrics from the staging database and aggregates the metrics based on aggregation settings associated with each metric; and

a data set generation module which packages data sets to be displayed, each data set comprised of a portion of the aggregated metrics, the data sets defined by metric attributes which are included in the metric parameters.

12. The system of claim 11, wherein the staging database includes a database schema for loading extracted data, storing metrics generated from the extracted data, and defining a hierarchy comprised of one or more attributes for each metric.

14. The system of claim 11, wherein the system further includes:

a display application that receives display configuration files, the display configuration files able to configure the display application to display metric data generated by the staging database and packaged by the data set generation module, the packaged data including metric attribute value for at least a portion of the metrics.

15. One or more processor readable storage devices having processor readable code embodied on said processor readable storage devices, said processor readable code for programming one or more processors to perform a method comprising:

receiving configuration files having metric calculation parameters and display parameters;

retrieving two or more sets of data associated with two or more servers based on the configuration files, wherein each of the two or more servers have data stored in a different schema;

generating metric data for each of the two or more servers from the two or more sets of data and the configuration files;

aggregating the metric data for each of the two or more servers; and

displaying the aggregated metric data based on the display parameters in the configuration files for each metric.

16. The one or more processor readable storage devices of claim 15, the method further comprising:

generating two or more queries from configuration parameters; and

sending the two or more queries to the two or more servers, the two or more sets of data received in response to the two or more queries.

17. The one or more processor readable storage devices of claim 15, said step of generating metric data includes:

determining the measured events of each of the two or more servers.

18. The one or more processor readable storage devices of claim 15, said step of generating metric data includes:

determining the outage of each of the two or more servers.

19. The one or more processor readable storage devices of claim 15, wherein said step of displaying the aggregated metric data includes:

accessing the aggregated metric data;

loading display settings from one of the configuration files;

generating a display based on the display settings; and

populating the display with the aggregated metric data.

20. The one or more processor readable storage devices of claim 15, wherein the configuration files are in XML format.