Nagios World Conference

[Mike Guthrie]

Hi All,

Andreas Ericsson wrote:
> Hi all. I attended the Nagios World Conference North America last week
> and though I'd dish out some kudos where such are due, and also dense
> up the information to any newcomers that might get lucky when looking
> for solutions to any particular problems.
>
> Overall, the standard of the conference was very, very high. It was the
> first Nagios conference I've gone to where I learned something new. A
> rare occasion indeed, so many thanks to Ethan, Mary and Nagios Enterprises
> for arranging such a high-quality event. I won't mention their talks,
> since I don't want to inflate their egos too much, but check out the one
> on visualizations by Mike Guthrie. Pretty cool stuff :)
>
>   
I agree, the conference was very cool.  I'm still decompressing from all 
of the ideas that I got from other users.  Thanks for the shout out, I'm 
flattered ; )

> Much of the focus was on scaling up Nagios. mod_gearman and livestatus
> seem to be the most known and used projects for achieving that goal.
> Reading status files is just too slow when viewing the UI, and a single
> server just doesn't scale to enough checks (yet). DNX also seemed very
> well investigated and used in some places, although a documentation
> mishap seems to have lead many potential users away from it. For those
> wondering, DNX can indeed distribute checks to workers based on host-
> groups, just as mod_gearman can. It's just not well documented.
> LivestatusSlave also got a lot of interest, although it didn't seem to
> be as well used as either of the other three.
> Kudos to Sven Nierlein (mod_gearman author/maintainer) Mathias Kettner
> (mk_livestatus author/maintainer) and Lars Michelsen (LivestatusSlave
> author). Your stuff is being used in production for positively *huge*
> installs, so well done guys :) I sure hope you go to the conference
> next year so you can talk about future development and gather even more
> interest for your projects.
>
> Merlin wasn't much discussed, although the DNX maintainers (and I)
> recommend it as the only sane way to get redundancy and automagic
> loadbalancing. Probably because of the misconception that you're
> required to run a separate UI and a fork of Nagios when using it. At
> least that's what my slightly hurt ego wants to believe ;)
>
>   
I will admit my own ignorance in realizing what Merlin can do, along 
with several other projects I learned about last week.  I think one of 
the biggest things I took away from the conference is just the enormous 
need to document and better publicize existing projects and also how to 
implement some of the powerful set ups that many users have had to 
figure out the hard way.  Nagios is incredibly flexible and there's so 
much that can be done with it, after this week I'm realizing that the 
existing documentation just scratches the surface of what can be done 
with it.  If there's a need from the community, it's more documentation, 
tutorials, and publicity.  There's a wealth of great projects and Nagios 
tricks out there and I for one would love to see that users are getting 
all of the information that they need for the environments that they run. 


> General tips for running large installations is to offload the various
> spool directories to ramdisk, along with status.dat and objects.cache
> (since they're read quite frequently). Work is under way to make that
> unnecessary by simply getting rid of disk I/O as much as possible. It
> was pretty much headnodding when these tips were iterated in one talk
> after another, so it seems the attending part of the Nagios community
> have reach consensus that that's the best way to do it. Mounting all
> disks with the noatime option is also a very good tip that'll get your
> disk write operations (the slow ones) down to a fragment of what they
> were before you latched that option on.
>
>
> Many have large headaches with getting various graphing solutions to
> scale properly. Some resorted to using Fusion I/O cards with exabyte
> performance (quite expensive...), since using ramdisk to store the
> tens or hundreds of gigabytes of rrd-files generated in large installs
> isn't really an option. It would be nice to hear Joerg Linge's (author of
> PNP4Nagios) take on other paths to increase performance next year. It
> seems his project is the most widely used for graphing, so getting it to
> perform exceptionally well would be time well spent.
>
> Apart from that, there were plenty of other good presentations and very
> awesome drinking^H^H^H^H^H^H^H mingle sessions. I highly recommend you
> attend it next year if you're managing nagios install at $dayjob, or
> if you're working on a Nagios addon project and want to get immediate
> feedback on what users are looking for.
>
>   


-- 


Mike Guthrie
Technical Team
___
Nagios Enterprises, LLC
Email:  mguthrie at nagios.com
Web:    www.nagios.com


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