The MySQL Enterprise Service Manager core, built on top of the Tomcat web server, is the server that handles tasks such as collecting information from each MySQL Enterprise Agent, formatting and inserting information into the repository, and executing the rules from the MySQL Enterprise Advisor collections.

Because the system is built on top of Tomcat and Java, the performance of the system depends on the configuration and optimization of the Java environment. The standard configuration is designed to support most typical installations, but for installations that involve a larger number of monitored servers, or that support a large numbers of clients using the MySQL Enterprise Dashboard, you can change the configuration to optimize performance. For example, you might increase the Java memory sizes for better caching.

The data collected by the MySQL Enterprise Service Manager is stored within the MySQL Enterprise Monitor repository. The repository uses a MySQL database, so that MySQL Enterprise Monitor can take advantage of MySQL features such as the InnoDB storage engine and partitioning systems.

You can optimize the configuration of the MySQL server depending on the hardware capacity, for example extending the cache memory for the InnoDB storage engine or the thread processes. The default configuration places both the MySQL server and the Tomcat service on the same machine. To dedicate more resources to the MySQL and Tomcat components, you can separate the two across two different machines.

The MySQL Enterprise Dashboard is a series of JSP pages displayed through the Tomcat service. These web pages display and control all the components of the system, including the different views of data, notification system, graphing engine and the configuration of the MySQL Enterprise Service Manager.