Architecture & Scalability
Enterprise Server
The Enterprise Server (ES) is the central collection, processing and reporting server that provides the control, cost rating and usage data record management functions. The Enterprise Server performs the following functions:
- Collects and aggregates data from all Collection Servers, for required reporting cycles - daily, weekly, monthly, or ad-hoc - and optional service pricing
- Applies Service Pricing, either:
- Dynamic service pricing, derived from total usage and
a cost pool of a given resource, or
- Fixed service pricing, derived from an assigned cost
per MB of network traffic
- Loads processed usage and cost data in a relational database for reporting and analysis
Collection Server
The Collection Server (CS) efficiently collects and aggregates usage data across the network. In typical deployments, there are multiple collection servers distributed across the enterprise network in order to process raw network conversation data locally and only transfer aggregated and correlated data to the centralized Enterprise Server (data reduction). The Collection Server performs the following functions:
- Collects unstructured network conversation data from existing network sources via collectors
- Generate Universal Data Records (UDR’s) for additional processing
- Normalizes data format for further processing
- Aggregates normalized data and eliminates duplicates
- Correlates resulting data according to the Evident Information Model – data enrichment
- Summarizes the resulting structured data, for further processing by the Enterprise Server
Evident Enterprise Scalability
Evident Enterprise is deployed in some of the largest Fortune 100 companies in distributed global configurations consisting of multiple Collection Servers and a single Enterprise Server.
Regional Collection Servers collect and process local network usage data from existing instrumentation such as Cisco NetFlow, RMON2 and NetScout nGenius software. Each Collection Server performs duplicate conversation elimination, aggregation, and correlation of usage data to create summary usage records. The summary usage records from each Collection Server are then uploaded to the central Enterprise Server on a daily basis, where rating models and billing rules are applied, and report processing can be performed.
A single Collection Server can process up to 25-30 million usage records per day. If a particular region produces more usage records, an additional Collection Server can be deployed to distribute the load and provide additional reliability. In large configurations, the Evident Enterprise Server and the database server are deployed separately. For smaller configurations, the Enterprise and Collection Servers can be configured to run on one physical server.
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