Unscheduled purging, archiving, exporting, and importing instance data

You can purge, archive, export, and import instance data for a monitor model version on a one-time basis using the administrative console or using scripts from a command line.

When you export or archive instance data, each monitoring context in the model version creates a different .csv file with specific monitoring context instance data including all metric values. The name of the .csv file is generated based on the model name, model version, monitoring context name, and timestamp. Each monitoring context also creates a .csv file for heading information including metrics names, which is consistent with the data in the instance data file. The name of the .csv file with heading information is generated based on the model name, model version, and monitoring context name.

When instances are purged, you can optionally archive those instances to the .csv file on the IBM® Business Monitor server file system.

When an instance is exported to the .csv file, the value for the stopwatch is just what it is at the time of the export. So for the unclosed stopwatch of an active instance, it keeps the value as a closed stopwatch after the instance is imported. The following scenario demonstrates this limitation of the import function:

The monitor model has run for a period of time and has some terminated instances and active instances.
Export the terminated and active instances into the flat files.
Import the instances into another environment.
The active instances are resumed for processing. But for the active instances, you might import the incorrect value for the stopwatch metric because the stopwatch is unclosed when exporting, but closed after importing.