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Title
ApexSQL Audit sizing and system requirements -
Description
What size does ApexSQL Audit repository database grows to?
What is ApexSQL Audit Processor and RAM usage? -
Resolution
Introduction
The purpose of this article is to provide ApexSQL Audit customers with general guidelines to obtain the best performance from ApexSQL Audit in their given environments. This guide will help you choose correct hardware resources based on your auditing requirements that will ensure proper performance and good user experience.
General system requirements
To make full use of this guide it is good to first understand and investigate information on the following:- The total amount of data that will be collected by ApexSQL Audit Central server
- The number of SQL Servers that will be audited by ApexSQL Audit
Assessing your environment
In order to properly size ApexSQL Audit environment certain key information must be gathered beforehand:- The starting point is to determine the numbers of SQL Servers opted for auditing
- The next step is to understand the operation type per configuration level both server and database
- Finally, you need to estimate the number of total events audited on a daily basis to determine average trend.
ApexSQL Audit stores all gathered data into Central repository. Size in repository of one audited event may vary by length of SQL text data. Based on data received from ApexSQL Audit customers average SQL text data length varies around 400 characters.
Check the following table to see repository size incrementation based on number of stored audited events:Audited events Repository size 1 million 1 GB 5 million 6 GB 10 million 12 GB 25 million 28 GB 50 million 60 GB 100 million 120 GB
Standard assumption: One million audited events roughly takes 1.2 GB space in Repository
ApexSQL Audit sizing recommendations
This section is designed to provide hardware recommendations for the ApexSQL Audit when installing on new or existing hardware.
Repository storage recommendations
When assessing the speed of storage to be used with ApexSQL Audit, it is important to ensure that the selected storage can support high number of random I/O that ApexSQL Audit can generate. When planning your storage needs, make sure to focus on drive quantity to meet your disk I/O performance, rather than capacity requirements. This is because it can take more disk to satisfy your I/O needs than it can for your capacity needs. Failure to size storage in this order can result in having the proper storage capacity but not enough I/O capability. This may result in multiple jobs being queued up, sluggish Central performance, slow auditing data storing and extend report creation.
Repository size Storage IOPS Up to 1 GB 100 Up to 10 GB 300 Up to 50 GB 500 Up to 100 GB 800 100GB+ 1200+
ApexSQL Audit Central server processor recommendations
ApexSQL Audit processor consumption increases as the number of amount of audited data increases.
The following table is meant to provide a general guideline as to what class of CPU 2GHz+ will be required for a given number of daily audited events.
Daily audited events CPU cores Up to 20 million 2 Up to 40 million 4 Up to 60 million 8 Up to 80 million 16 Up to 100 million 32
ApexSQL Audit Central server RAM recommendations
The RAM consumption is directly proportional to the amount of audited data, therefore the higher RAM utilization on the ApexSQL Audit central server is expected. The reason for this is that SQL Server caches the data for the Repository in RAM so that it can access the data faster than it could if it needed to read the data from the disk every time ApexSQL Audit Central needs it. The exhaustion of RAM resource has potential to degrade system performance, so it is recommended to keep a watchful eye on RAM consumption when extracting and continuously managing huge reports. Below are sizing estimates for ApexSQL Audit Central based on average SQL Server RAM consumption observed in testing and various customer environments.
Audited events in Repository RAM Up to 1 million 8 GB Up to 5 million 16 GB Up to 20 million 32 GB Up to 50 million 64 GB Up to 100 million 128 GB
ApexSQL Audit audited server RAM recommendation
Regardless of amount of audited data on the auditing server, ApexSQL Audit has minimum (negligible) RAM utilization.For more info please visit the ApexSQL Audit requirements page