Scaling a Nagios Server

[Frost, Mark {PBG}]

Hello.  We've got a single Nagios server with the following stats

2 x Intel Xeon 2.4Ghz CPUs (hyperthreaded)
3.6Gb of memory
Red Hat AS 3 Linux
Nagios 2.9
Host Checks: 451
Service Checks: 2358
Average OS load level: 3

Service Check Execution Time (min/max/avg):  	0.03 sec	30.04
sec	0.500 sec
Service Check Latency (min/max/avg):	0.01 sec	33.67 sec
5.516 sec

Host Check Execution Time:  	0.00 sec	26.78 sec	0.722
sec
Host Check Latency:	0.00 sec	3.68 sec	0.008 sec

This box is almost exclusively doing active service checks.  It is
almost dedicated to Nagios (it does a couple of other things, all very
low-volume).

This server has grown considerably over time to encompass quite a lot
more Nagios activity than it had when I took over Nagios admin.  Now it
seems active enough to start planning on scaling it somehow.  While
there will definitely be growth, I'm not really sure how I should break
this architecture out.  Our Nagios growth is a bit unpredictable as
people ask us to monitor their stuff, but I might guess it at 20% per
year.

I assume I'd want to start looking at the distributed models for Nagios.
My problem is that I feel like any architecture I try to plan out is
really just a guess for this load (and predicted future load).

Can anyone suggest where I should go from here in terms of planning out
a Nagios-for-the-future architecture?  How many hosts, for example?  We
looked at possibly going VM with Nagios, but it appears that at least
with this configuration, Nagios is taking up too many resources.  We
could probably scale out with VM's, but I imagine we'd need more VM's
(hosts) than we'd need with physical boxes.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Mark

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