How does the DataPower Operations Dashboard tool communicate with the DataPower devices when gathering stats and configurations? Does this have any noticable impact on performance?

Operations Dashboard utilizes the DataPower log files to get its information.  In most cases, there is a nominal impact on overall DataPower performance, and will never be noticed in a production environment.  If you are using the option to capture the full payload data, there may be a larger performance impact on the running system, but this is usually done only as an exception

Thanks for the info, Steven.