The Historian enables you to archive data from any RTView data source to any database using JDBC. The Historian is a separate application process that runs independently from the other RTView Data Servers. The sole purpose of the Historian is to gather data and then, optionally, process and store that data with time-stamped values into your database. This historical information is most often utilized as a source of data (via SQL data attachments) in dashboards and alert definitions in RTView solutions.
The SQL data source is required to view data from the Historian in RTView. If you use the Historian without a license to the SQL data source the data is not visible in RTView. This might be suitable if you are using another SQL client. See “RTView Data Sources” for more information.
Note: You may not be licensed to run all RTView data sources.
The Historian is commonly used for:
§ Business, Operations and Performance Analysis: Create trend charts to view and compare with current data, and perform calculations on a wide range of metric values over a long period of time.
§ Baselines & Alerting: Use your historical data as the baseline for the creation of alerts that notify you when your current metrics are outside the normal range. Rather than hard-coding the alert thresholds, you specify the alerts as a percent (%). This makes for a more accurate alerting system.
§ Reporting and Audit Trails: Create a database that you can leverage for a variety of reporting or auditing tools, and for surveying your historical data.
The Historian is instrumented with JMX which allows you to manage and monitor application settings. See “Managing the Historian Using JMX” for more information.
You configure the Historian by creating Data Configuration (.rtv) files, configuring the Historian to create connections to your data sources, and setting final configurations in the Historian application (see “Configuring the Historian”). After the Historian has stored data over a period of time, you can build a display using History data (see “Building a Display Using History Data”).
For information about the Advanced Historian, see the “Advanced Historian”.