In a Stealthwatch deployment with a Data Store, the Data Store cluster sits between
your SMC and Flow Collectors. One or more Flow Collectors ingests and deduplicates
flows, performs analysis, and reports data and results directly to the Data Store,
distributing it roughly equally to all of the Data Nodes. The Data Store facilitates data
storage, keeps all of your traffic in that centralized location as opposed to spread across
multiple Flow Collectors, and offers greater storage capacity than multiple Flow
Collectors. See the following diagram for an example.
To resolve user-submitted queries, including graphs and charts, the SMC queries the
Data Store. The Data Store finds matching results in the columns relevant to the query,
then retrieves the matching rows and returns the query results to the SMC. The SMC
generates the graph or chart without needing to collate multiple result sets from multiple
Flow Collectors. This reduces the cost of querying, as compared to querying multiple
Flow Collectors, and improves query performance.
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Data Store Concepts and Architecture