[mrtg] Re: MRTG Scalablity

[Alex van den Bogaerdt]

> A usage question for you all. I'm interested in how scalable MRTG can be in large scale enterprise
> networks (upwards of 5000 nodes). Are any of you running it in such a complex environment and if so
> how is it performing? I'm not looking for absolute statistics - more just a feel for how much it can
> handle before it starts slowing down. I understand of course when talking about networks like this
> one usually turns to OpenView, Unicenter, or Spectrum or similar, but it's awful hard for these
> products to compete on the basis of price with freeware...
> 

Just my opinions, your mileage may vary, no guaranties, my statements
are my own and not my employers, etcetera.


I wouldn't dare to compare mrtg to openview. IMO they do different things.

The network will handle the load with ease. Network jitter could be
a problem as monitoring intervals should be as constant as possible and
mrtg does not compensate for this. Same for variable host delays.

The real bottleneck will be the host it is running on. MRTG uses much
memory and cpu power. If possible go for distributed monitoring.
A few hours of integrating the several webpages / hosts into one system
and you won't see the difference with one host monitoring all.

One thing to speed it up considerably would be using rrdtool as the
back-end. This can be done but is rather new and could give some
problems. See contrib/14all/*

Some low end pentium systems, linux, mrtg, 200 to 300 interfaces
per host, running apache webserver should work out fine.
Tune it by using rrdtool, perhaps move apache away from the monitoring
hosts, stripping linux to its bare minimum or using better computers
(more cpu or other arch) may make it possible to use 2000+ interfaces
per server. 430 interfaces on pentium 100 w/ 64MB, no optimizing done,
is just about possible but painful.

Regards,
Alex

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