Large Installation

[Kevin Keane]

Nagios does have some scalability issues, but for the most part you won't run into them until you get to truly huge installations.

I can see three main scalability issues: config file maintenance and the need for one central server, and firewall issues.

Config file maintenance can be improved to some extent with careful design of the config files, as well as tools. It is an issue that I am running into with a relatively small installation with 80+ hosts and 400+ services. My installation is highly heterogeneous and very dynamic, which makes config file maintenance a nightmare. Having to restart Nagios after a configuration change doesn't help either. On the other hand, a network with 2000 identical machines is probably going to be much easier to manage than my type of network.

The central server is an obvious bottleneck. No matter how powerful the machine and the network connection, there are only so many checks results it can handle. Fortunately, Nagios doesn't require much horsepower. Distributed monitoring helps with this issue because the most expensive part of Nagios is running active checks. With distributed monitoring, the active checks can run on multiple smaller boxes, and then send the check results back as passive checks.

Of course distributed monitoring compounds the config file maintenance issue, because you have to configure each check multiple times.

The third issue is not directly a scalability issue. Nagios is built with the assumption of a local and mostly trusted network. It's non-trivial to securely get checks to work on remote machines without pretty gaping poking holes into firewalls, and/or frequently establishing and tearing down encrypted connections with the attendant processing load. There are some third-party solutions for this issue, though.

From: Scott Ward [mailto:13.sward.13 at gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, June 10, 2010 12:34 PM
To: Nagios Users List
Subject: Re: [Nagios-users] Large Installation

>Make sure to read these pages:
>
>http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/tuning.html<http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/tuning.html>
>http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/largeinstalltweaks.html<http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/largeinstalltweaks.html>
>
>Also, if you're monitoring 800 machines across WANs, you might look
>into distributed monitoring:
>http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/distributed.html<http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/distributed.html>
>
>Let us know how it goes!

Thanks for the links.  So the distributive monitoring provided by the Nagios docs can handle what we're trying to do?  I have read in a few places that Nagios has scalability issues.

>
>--Matt
>
>BTW, what are you using for your config maintenance?

We haven't decided yet. Do you have any recommendations?


~S

On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 2:23 PM, Matt Simmons <standalone.sysadmin at gmail.com<mailto:standalone.sysadmin at gmail.com>> wrote:
Make sure to read these pages:

http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/tuning.html
http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/largeinstalltweaks.html

Also, if you're monitoring 800 machines across WANs, you might look
into distributed monitoring:
http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/distributed.html

Let us know how it goes!

--Matt

BTW, what are you using for your config maintenance?


On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 1:51 PM, Scott Ward <13.sward.13 at gmail.com<mailto:13.sward.13 at gmail.com>> wrote:
> We are looking to do an large installation of Nagios. Is it possible to
> monitor over 800 machines and over 14000 services?
>
> Has anyone tried doing anything like this? If you have how successful was it
> and how did you configure it?
>
> ~Rultax
>
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