realistic system requirements and capacity

[Russell Adams]

I ran Netsaint 0.0.4b on a P90 w/ 64MB for many years, until the load
levels reached about 300-500% monitoring 120 hosts and 200
services. Netsaint was still single-threaded, and at this load level
took about 10-12 minutes to complete each run of service checks...

I recently upgraded to Netsaint 0.0.7 on a PII/450 w/ 128MB which is
monitoring 230 hosts and 350 services and its now at about 200%
load. The parallel checks mean that my service checks are running
within a fraction of a second of when the scheduler says they should,
so there's little latency. However the execution time varies by a few
seconds depending on the load.

I'm planning on getting a Ghz machine w/ 256MB next to upgrade to
Nagios.  Even though my server load could increase to monitoring about
300+ hosts and 500 services, I think I could handle that on a single
system still. After that, I would consider doing the distributed
monitoring. Depends on the number and type of services being
checked. A ping check takes very little time and resources, and a
single machine could handle thousands I'm sure. However I'm monitoring
processes, disks, and more via SNMP, and some other custom shell
scripts, at about 5-6 services per host. These really load down the
system, when compared to my 130 ping only checks.

>From my experience, disk space is nearly irrelevant, CPU does all the
work and some memory can speed it up. I've also heard good things
about putting your plugins into a RAM disk, but if the machine does
nothing but Netsaint then I'd think the cache is just as effective
when there's enough memory available.

Perhaps this historic data can put your machine selection into
perspective. 

Russell Adams
Systems Administrator
Kelsey Seybold Clinics

On Wed, Sep 18, 2002 at 08:59:17AM -0700, George Miscioscia wrote:
> To any and all experienced nagios users, what system requirements would you
> recommend to run a Nagios install at full capacity, and what would you
> consider full capacity before impementing distributed servers? I.E., how
> many checks would you recommend one server perform?
> 
> thanks,
> 
> George Miscioscia
> Manager, Internet Systems
> Ticketmaster/Citysearch
> office (213)739-3521
> cell    (310)902-6743
> 
> 
> 
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