Patent ID: 7840544

Claim:
A method of reducing the amount of storage space required to store data gathered from a network, comprising: collecting data from one or more devices in a network, the collected data including a current value for at least one parameter for which data was previously collected and stored; determining whether the current value of the parameter has changed relative to a previously collected value for the parameter; upon determining that the current value of the parameter has not changed, discarding the current value without storing a record; and upon determining that the current value of the parameter has changed: generating a delta value indicative of how much the parameter has changed over a time period since collecting the previously collected value, wherein the delta value is calculated by dividing a difference between the current value and the previously collected value by an amount of time elapsed since collecting the previously collected value; and storing a record including at least the current value and the delta value, storing the current value in a numeric data field of the record if the parameter has a numeric data type, and, if the parameter has a string data type, generating a checksum for the current value of the parameter and storing the checksum in the numeric data field of the record.