The NFM-P provides a scalable platform for reliable statistics collection from managed NEs, and also provides statistics for monitoring NFM-P system processes and functions.

Depending on the statistics type, you can do the following with the collected data:

• Use an NFM-P GUI client to:

  • Schedule or perform on-demand collection.

  • View raw counter values in tabular format on the Statistics tab of an object properties form.

  • View multiple series of historical or real-time counter values in graphical format using the Statistics Plotter.

  • Save the tabular data or graphical representation to a file.

• Use an OSS client to retrieve the data for processing and analysis.

• Use the NSP Analytics to generate comprehensive, customized reports for traffic monitoring and trend analysis.

Note: Before you configure statistics collection, you must consider the NFM-P resource constraints; see  NFM-P statistics scalability for general information, and the NSP Planning Guide for release-specific scalability guidelines.

The NFM-P can collect the following statistics types:

• performance statistics—collected by polling NE MIBs and transferred to the NFM-P using SNMP, or, for wireless PM counters, transferred from NEs to the NFM-P using FTP

• accounting statistics—collected in files on NEs and transferred to the NFM-P using FTP or SCP

• flow statistics—forwarded by NEs to a target file server for retrieval by an OSS, or to the NFM-P for use by the NSP Analytics.

• server performance statistics—collected by NFM-P system processes and stored in the NFM-P database

See NFM-P statistics types for more information about each statistic type.

Policy-based collection

To collect statistics such as NE performance or accounting statistics, the NFM-P uses policies that specify the following:

• the network or service objects to collect statistics from

• the statistics counters to collect

• the collection rate

• how long the NFM-P is to retain the collected statistics data

From the Statistics tab of an object properties form, you can use the following buttons to perform an on-demand collection of network or server performance statistics:

• Collect—returns one statistics record

• Collect All—returns one statistics record for each statistic type that the object supports

Note: On-demand statistics collection may yield inconsistent results the first time it is run against an object. To obtain valid results, you must run the on-demand statistics collection more than once.

Statistics are stored for a configurable retention period that is defined in an NFM-P statistics policy. When the retention period elapses, the statistics are removed. However, statistics that are collected for real-time display are not stored; the statistics are available only for the duration of the current session, and only for the operator that initiates the session.

Figure 1-1: Basic statistics-collection architecture