realistic system requirements and capacity

[Darren Gamble]

Good day,

> 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?

There is really no quick answer for this, as there are a lot of factors to
weigh in.

- the performance of the monitoring machine
- the number of checks being done
- what type of checks are done
- the frequency of the checks

Provided that the monitoring machine can keep up with the frequency of the
checks, you will be all right.  Nagios comes with some tools to check
latency of its service checks to determine if one is having performance
problems.

We have a single-proc P3 that easily handles one check per second.  

Really, it comes down to installing the software and watch the load on the
machine as well as its service checking statistics.  After you've done this,
you may want to consider changing the frequency of some checks depending on
their importance.

Overall, Nagios and its plugins are pretty lightweight, so you should be
able to handle a few hundred machines with services on just a single
machine.

============================
Darren Gamble
Planner, Regional Services
Shaw Cablesystems GP
630 - 3rd Avenue SW
Calgary, Alberta, Canada
T2P 4L4
(403) 781-4948


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