Benefits of RAW vs. TABLE

Question

I was looking at converting most of my collections to RAW instead of TABLE. Use of RAW appears to make most of my reports and their SQL substantially more accessible, I don't have to do some pretty gnarly multiple joins against MGMT@METRIC_CURRENT tables. But in looking at one of your own plug-ins, I was surprised to see that when you do RAW, you don't have any CONDITIONS specified in the default_collection.
Can metrics collected as "RAW" also contain CONDITIONS? For example, for CpuUtilization here, if SimpleMetrics are collected as RAW, would this threshold still work? Here is the metadata snippet:
<Metric NAME="SimpleMetrics" TYPE="RAW" CONFIG="TRUE">
<Display>
<Label NLSID="xxxxx">Simple Metrics</Label>
</Display>
<TableDescriptor TABLE_NAME="MGMT_SXXXXX0_SIMPLE_METRICS">
<ColumnDescriptor NAME="CpuUtilization" COLUMN_NAME="CpuUtilization" TYPE="NUMBER">
<Display>
<Label NLSID="xxxx_cpu_utilization">CPU Utilization %</Label>
</Display>
</ColumnDescriptor>
And the Default Collection snippet:
<CollectionItem NAME="SimpleMetrics">
<Schedule>
<IntervalSchedule INTERVAL="10" TIME_UNIT="Min"/>
</Schedule>
<Condition COLUMN_NAME="CpuUtilization" CRITICAL="90"
WARNING="80" OPERATOR="GE" OCCURRENCES="3" MESSAGE="The CPU Utilization
Percentage is %value%
and has remained above the warning (%warning_threshold%) or
critical (%critical_threshold%) threshold."
MESSAGE_NLSID="cpu_percentage_used_cond"/>
Next, I noticed that your CMDB information tended to be collected as RAW whereas your detailed statistics were collected in a TABLE. Is there an advantage to collecting static information within a table and highly variable information as RAW or was this simply reporting convenience?
Finally, many of highly variable statistics I want to present as time-span graphs. If I collect a stat is RAW, do the MGMT$METRIC_HOURLY (etc...) tables still get populated?
Thanks for the Help
Paul Monday

Answer 1

The RAW designation is only used for the configuration data metrics. Those are collected as RAWs because it's a requirement of the ECM system. No conditions are set because all of that information is configuration data and it doesn't really make sense to alert on that (it's relatively static). If there's a change, the user finds out through the ECM system and not the alerting system.
And, as you saw, TABLE is used for all of the performance metrics. Using RAW for the metric means that the data will not be stored in the EM metric tables and is instead stored in an independent table. The data won't be rolled up and isn't accessible from the MGMT$METRIC views if it's RAW.