A datacenter management system uses data collection proxies to collect performance data and configuration data for different physical and virtual entities in the datacenter. A schema is used to represent the different entities, entity relationships, and entity properties in the datacenter. A search engine identifies the intent of a natural language based search query based on the schema and a datacenter dictionary. The search engine then searches the data based on the search query intent. A dictionary manager converts both periodic and aperiodic data into a time series. This allows the search engine to operate as a time machine identifying both performance data and configuration data for any selectable time period.