Monthly Archive for January, 2012

Nagios Performance Tuning – Tech Tips: Understanding Disk I\O

We often get questions about the kind of hardware requirements needed for a particular Nagios installation.  As covered in a previous article, this is often a very difficult question to answer since monitoring environments differ so much.  Most people assume that for a large Nagios installation, it’s a matter of simply adding enough CPU’s to the machine to handle the workload that it’s given.  Although having enough CPU power is important, I’ve found that it’s ultimately not the biggest hardware limitation to the system.  A large Nagios installation creates an enormous amount of disk activity, and if the hard disk can’t keep up with the constant traffic flow that needs to happen, all of those precious CPU’s are simply going to wait in line to be able to do what they need to do on the system.  I’ve talked to some users who have spent some serious money on hardware to have insanely fast disks to handle their workload, but I wanted to do some experiments in-house for those users who may need to have better performance on a budget.  I want to give special thanks to Nagios community members Dan Wittenberg and Max Schubert for documenting some of the tricks that you guys pioneered on this topic.

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Nagios XI Operations Center Component

The new Nagios XI Operations Center Component provides a NOC screen-style view of all unhandled host and service problems. The screen automatically refreshes every 30 seconds to show the latest problem events.  This is one of two NOC-style screens recently created, along with the Nagios XI Operations Screen Component.  Users can pick a NOC screen to suit their visual tastes that will keep a close eye on the latest problems in their environment.

Download Nagios XI Operations Center Component

 

NSCA 2.9.1 Available

A new release of NSCA (2.9.1) is now available from SourceForge. Thanks to Daniel Wittenberg for a patch that allows nsca to receive packets with a future time stamp. Thanks to a suggestion on the mailing list by John Rouillard, the server (nsca) now allows packets with both the new (>= 2.9), larger plugin output buffer and the older (<2.9) plugin buffer.

Enjoy!

Managing Remote Nagios XI Servers

Managing a Nagios XI server is an important requirement to ensure that the monitoring server can be configured to meet organizational needs and that application updates (patches and upgrades) can be applied. Nagios XI servers that are placed on remote networks often requires that an administrator configures firewalls and routers to allow access to management features.

We wrote a short document that describes the requirements for and methods of managing remote Nagios XI servers. To learn more, read the document on Nagios Exchange.