Hi Steve, I prefer your distributed approach as the workload is spread across the servers, and the data is discrete on each server. This approach provides a more granular backup and also simplifies rebuilding the aggregated data from its sources on the distributed servers. The central monitoring server then behaves like a data warehouse, gathering data from the distributed servers, performing extract-transform-load type tasks and managing the database. This architecture becomes more complex when you want to monitor activity in real time. However, you can retain the local copies of the data and also send a copy of the data to the monitoring server in real time.