The Global Statistics Report (GSR) Collector is a multi-purpose mechanism that collects data for storage usage statistics and policy-based storage redistribution, generates reports on anomalies such as a user with a non-existent home folder, and catalogs objects and their paths for historical purposes.
The data collected by the GSR Collector has four primary uses:
GSR Collector Anomaly Analysis
Global Statistics
History
Policy-based Path Redistribution
Your usage of the GSR Collector data might be specific to all of these or some subset. You should analyze your needs of the feature set it provides and weigh them with the frequency and scope that best suits your needs.
For example, Anomaly Analysis might be an important tool for helping you determine the state of your unmanaged data when you have no configured policies or when you’re initially implementing Novell Storage Manager. Thereafter, you might not need to examine the reports on a daily basis. In this case, after your policies are configured and users are managed, you might opt to change the schedule of the GSR Collector to run weekly.
The global statistics provided by the GSR Collector offer insight into how your storage is being consumed by the supported categories of objects (e.g. user and collaborative) but it comes at a price. It can be expensive to run if you do not have quotas enabled via File Storage Resource Manager (FSRM) or your managed Storage Resources primarily consist of NAS devices.
Alternatively, you might find that the global statistics are less important in lieu of your need for a finer granularity of historical data. The same size data used for the global statistics is also used for Policy-based Path Redistribution. Depending on the policies for which you plan to redistribute data, you might configure the GSR Collector to perform a Complete Inspection on the paths for a specific policy. This approach would eliminate the need to wait for a Complete Inspection to be performed needlessly against all storage resources.
The GSR Collector is designed to be run on a scheduled interval so that you can collect the appropriate data to provide the necessary granularity for your needs. By default, the GSR Collector does not run unless you run it manually or configure it to run based on a schedule.