Antwort: Hardware requirements

[Sascha.Runschke at gfkl.com]

"Tommy Mogensen" <tommy.mogensen at uni-c.dk> schrieb am 01.12.2009 16:14:39:

> I am looking for a free system able to monitor 3000-5000 hosts (Mainly
> cisco routers, switches and ap's) via ping and snmp. I would prefer to
> run everything on one server if possible.
> 
> I have received a good deal on a machine with 16G ram, 2xSSD-disks
> (maybe in raid-0), and 2xIntel E5520-CPUs. I would appreciate your input
> regarding the performance issues should I use Nagios for this system.
> 
> Is this configuration powerful enough, what are the limiting parts of
> the setup and are some of the pieces unnecessary? I.e. I could go for
> one cpu (4 cores) if nagios does not support threading to 8 cores....or
> is the main bottleneck that I do not run it distributed?

It depends on how you want to implement the monitoring.
First of all you need to break down the services on a per minute
basis. The number of checks does not matter, but in which timeframe
matters a lot. If you plan on running 5.000 checks with 5 minute
interval - all is cool. If you are running 5.000 checks with 1
minute interval - you will need to tweak your nagios server a lot.

If you are just using nagios for pure monitoring, then you have
more then enough power.

If you are looking for using ndo for visualisation with NagVis for
example and/or graphing performance data with PNP4Nagios, then I/O is
your biggest obstacle.

Using SSDs for a DB is a two-fold sword - they runlike hell, but
SSDs melt in hell ;) It really depends on the quality of the SSDs.
If they are enterprise drives, they should be good to go for 1-2
years until they drop dead. If they are midline drives, you will burn
them quite fast.

The most important thing to have for a nagios installation with
local NDO and/or PNP4Nagios togeter with massive services is a
BBWC (battery backed write cache) of at least 512MB to aggregate
the written blocks and put it on 100% write / 0% read cache.
This speeds up NDO/PNP like tenfold. Read performance is neglectable
for nagios, write performance is all that matters.

I'm running 2.000+ service checks per minute on 5GB, 2x 2GHz QuadCore
machine with 2 local 10K hdd's in RAID1 with a local mysql DB for
NDO, performance graphing of around 1.200 services with PNP4Nagios
and hosting NagVis for visualisation via mysql on the same server.
Average load over 1 month is ~2.7 with peaks going up to load 8 aprox.
Before the use of a BBWC I had an average load of 8 with peaks
around 20 due to I/O retention.

Regards
        Sascha



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