NRPE vs NCSA

[Richard Galvez]

I agree, you should plan for expansion with nagios. No sense in limiting
yourself with nrpe when you can just engineer for growth with nsca. I'm
implementing the same configuration now, with nsca and I would like to
point you to a document on the nagios website in the docs section.
Someone wrote a very good howto to setup nsca.

Regards,
Richard

On Wed, 2006-09-13 at 14:10 +0200, Thomas Sluyter wrote:
> On 13 Sep, 2006, at 13:14, Hari Sekhon wrote:
> 
> > While NCSA would reduce load slightly (probably not noticeably  
> > though I
> > expect), NRPE would allow for a more centralised way of doing things,
> > especially since I keep my entire nagios config under svn and like  
> > to be
> > able to redeploy it centrally.
> >
> > Does anybody have any advice as to which I should go with? What  
> > have you
> > used and what are your experiences of this?
> 
> A few weeks ago I was stuck with the same question. Back then a  
> fellow by the pseudonym "Jakked Up" (he frequents many Nagios fora)  
> helped my out by discussing the matter over e-mail.
> 
> One of the most important things to keep in mind is the amount of  
> checks you'll be performing and how things will be scheduled by Nagios.
> 
> Say that you're running 1000 service checks through NRPE and that you  
> want them all run within 5 minutes. Let's assume that each service  
> check averages at 3 seconds before the results are in (best case  
> scenario). This would mean that Nagios would have a thousand three- 
> second connections open every five minutes. Parallelizing things  
> using the Nagios scheduler will help naturally...
> 
> But now start thinking big... Around 7000 service checks? Would mean  
> 21.000 seconds worth of network connections crammed into five  
> minutes. That's not going to work nicely.
> 
> And all of this is still excluding things like retries in the case of  
> a failure. Or assloads of retries in the case of massive failure.
> 
> Now, if you take NSCA, the server will still be getting 7000 incoming  
> connections every five minutes, but:
> 1) All incoming data will be dumped in the NSCA queue
> 2) Nagios will "leisurely" pick through the NSCA queue to grab all  
> the status updates
> 
> Or, as he originally put it:
> 
> =====
> 
> To make a check on a remote system, via nrpe for example, nagios has  
> to schedule the check every 5 minutes, or whatever.
> The check is made, which means a plugin runs a script that connects  
> to a daemon running remotely.  The script then tells the daemon what  
> check to make.  The check is made, the data passed on to the client  
> connection, and now nagios has the data for the check and processes  
> it.  All of that is a lifetime, compared to:
> 
> Periodically nagios reads it's external command file, whenever it has  
> time to do so, depending on your settings.  At times, it finds  
> completed results of a service check.  All nagios has to do is  
> process that result.  So, the check is NOT even really made by the  
> central server.  It's already sitting there for it.  Of course, that  
> is only achieved via something like a passive check via nsca.
> 
> =====
> 
> Me, I'll be making our new Nagios environment as passive as possible.  
> Most checks will be performed locally (scheduled through a small  
> wrapper script I wrote, run from cron), after which the results are  
> submitted through NSCA. For the remaining active checks I'll be using  
> net-SNMP.
> 
> Cheers!
> 
> 
> 
> Thomas
> 
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-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security?
Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier
Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo
http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642
_______________________________________________
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Nagios-users at lists.sourceforge.net
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::: Please include Nagios version, plugin version (-v) and OS when reporting any issue. 
::: Messages without supporting info will risk being sent to /dev/null