Patent ID: 8437261

Claim:
A non-transitory computer-readable medium embodying a program executable in a computing device, the program comprising: code that obtains a stream of data items from a plurality of producers, each of the producers corresponding to a respective computing device; code that transmits at least some of the data items for analysis, wherein all of the data items are transmitted when the data items are being generated at a rate below a threshold, some of the data items are transmitted when the data items are being generated at a rate meeting the threshold, all of the data items corresponding to a protected item type are included within the some of the data items that are transmitted, and at least one data item corresponding to at least one non-protected item type is excluded from the some of the data items that are transmitted based at least in part on a relative frequency of occurrence of the respective non-protected item type in the stream; and code that generates at least one system performance metric for each of the producers according to the at least some of the data items that are transmitted for analysis, wherein all of the data items corresponding to the protected item type are necessary for accurately generating the at least one system performance metric.