Introduction
This article discusses recommendations for sizing the external database that Sentry will integrate with.
While use of an external database is not required for a Sentry deployment, several features of the product can utilize an external database. For a list of features and further info on using a database with Sentry, see:
Best Practices: Using Databases with Sentry
Sizing Considerations
The main considerations when sizing the database are the Sentry use case(s) for integrating with the database (i.e. archiving, reporting, config management, cookies, etc.). For example, if the use case is to archive each XML request/response message that passes through the system, the database may need to be quite large. However, if the use case is to use the database for centralized Sentry policy configuration only, a large database may not be required.
Other considerations are: how often the database will be "cleaned up", how often will you be backing up configs to the database, how many users with stored session cookies, etc.
Note that different databases can be used for different features.
General Recommendations
If there is no document archiving, allocation of 5-10GB is a good starting point as long as there is room to grow beyond that.
The following are general sizing recommendations for some common database use cases. These should be used as a guideline only.
WS Reports:
A database with over 100K reporting records and no saved documents is roughly 1mb in size. If you multiply the size of the records by the expected daily throughput and then multiply that by the number of days you intend to retain the records, this would provide a rough size estimate.
One Sentry deployment had 45 million records that represented 9 months at 140K transactions per day, and the size was around 10GB.
HTTP Cookie Persistence:
The database size for the cookie persistence use case depends on how many cookies you expect to have active at any one time. As a maximum, take the current number of users you have, multiply it by a safety factor 1.5 and then multiply that by the size of the cookie DB entry.
Configuration Management:
This depends on the number of machines, how often you write FSX and FSG files, and how big those files are.
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