Patent ID: 7817563

Claim:
A non-transitory computer-readable medium whose contents cause a computing system to perform a method for transmitting a plurality of time series data items, the method comprising: comparing a rate at which the time series data items in a data stream are being generated to a threshold rate, the time series data items being generated by a plurality of computer systems; when the rate at which the time series data items in the data stream are being generated is no greater than the threshold rate, transmitting all the time series data items in the data stream to a monitoring system, the monitoring system being configured to analyze the time series data items to generate at least one system performance metric for each respective one of the computer systems; and when the rate at which the time series data items in the data stream are being generated is greater than the threshold rate, transmitting only a proper subset of the time series data items in the data stream to the monitoring system, such that the time series data items are transmitted at a rate approximately equal to the threshold rate; wherein the proper subset includes all of the time series data items corresponding to a protected item type, and the system performance metrics generated by analyzing the proper subset are different from system performance metrics that would have been generated had any of the time series data items corresponding to the protected item type been excluded from the proper subset.