Database stores and distributed monitoring

[Andreas Ericsson]

Ben wrote:
> I'm fairly new to Nagios, but I installed it for my home network a week or
> two ago and I liked it a lot. So much so that I jumped at the chance to
> use it for monitoring 2500 of my servers at work. Needless to say, I
> quickly found out that monitoring 2500 servers is a little more demanding
> of resources than monitoring 6. :)
> 
> So, to try to keep the CGI performance from sucking so badly, I thought
> moving the data store into postgres and out of flat files would help.

You could try applying the chained hash patch. It makes a great speedup. 
It's in by default in 2.0, which is stable enough for us to run in 
production.

> And
> it did, but not enough. So now, even though I'm using a quad xeon with 4GB
> of ram for the nagios machine (the database lives elsewhere), now I'm
> thinking that maybe I should set up a distributed monitoring scheme too.
> 

Move the database to reside on the same server as Nagios runs on. Unless 
you're using embedded perl (which is really buggy) it shouldn't be a 
problem at all.

> But I'm a bit confused. If the distributed monitoring software can write 
> data into a database, and the CGIs read data out of the database.... do I 
> need to use the nsca tool to do passive service checks?
> 

Not necessarily, but it's the only way to make configuration sit on only 
one host. That won't do any good with regards to the CGI's though, since 
it still has to parse the same amount of information.

On the other hand; I can't imagine any one person being responsible for 
all those 2500 servers, so it might be prudent to have several separate 
installations of Nagios. Large networks will always be a bit sluggish to 
display in the webinterface because of the sheer amount of data it needs 
to read every time. The price large companies pay for success, I guess.

-- 
Sourcerer / Andreas Ericsson
OP5 AB
+46 (0)733 709032
andreas.ericsson at op5.se


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