[mrtg] Re: Maximum number of nodes that can be monitored with MRTG

[tony bourke]

Hi Dave,

MRTG can scale quite well.  Using RRDtool in conjunction with MRTG or with 
a seperate front-end (such as Cricket) can make it scale even further. 

I've polled against over 2,000 targets (an example of a target would be an 
interface on a router, there can be multiple targets per system) on a 
Pentium III machine at 800 MHz, with just plain non-RRDtool MRTG.  Going 
to RRDtool would allow it to scale even further.

My feeling is that MRTG runs more efficiently under a Unix or Unix-based
system, although I have no hard numbers to back that up; I could easily be
wrong.  Linux is a great platform to run MRTG on, as would most of the
other Unix-based systems (espeically those that are x86, since that
platform is inexpensive).

SCSI systems are probably a bit better suited for the task, especially
when deaing with a large number of targets, as they have the ability to
handle mutliple disk operations simultanteously better than IDE.  Though
with the speed of efficiency of the new IDE standards, this gap is far
less wide than it was perhaps 3 years ago.

RAID (IDE or SCSI) is even better when stripping accross multiple disks.  

But if someone told you 200 systems was the max, they were either
exagerating or each system had 100 targets each, in which case he'd be
right.  But considering what MRTG costs, if you had more targets than a
single machine would handle, you could afford to run two MRTG collectors
:)

Tony



On Thu, 21 Nov 2002, Bush, David A (IT) wrote:

> 
> Hey folks, 
> 	Can anyone tell me what the maximum number of nodes is for MRTG?
> We're using Trend for reporting right now, and frankly since HP took
> it over and we upgraded to the latest version I've --HATED-- it.
> Everything that was good about Trend was removed, and on top of
> everything else it's now about 10 times slower than the previous
> version. As such - I'm trying to get MRTG in the door, and my boss is
> open to the idea.
> 
> 	We're currently monitoring about 650 devices and I could see
> that roughly doubling in the future. Could MRTG realistically be used
> to monitor 1300 devices? What kind of hardware would we want for this?
> I'm assuming a *nix OS is preferred, which could also help me sneak
> Linux in the door.
> 
> 	The reason I ask is that one of the guys in network management
> heard somewhere that MRTG will only scale to about 200 devices. I
> certainly hope that isn't the case because I like MRTG and would love
> it if we could switch to that.
> 
> Thanks everyone, 
> - Dave
> 
> Dave Bush
> Network Analyst
> Corning, Inc.
> (607)974-0103
> bushda at corning.com
> 
> 
> --
> Unsubscribe mailto:mrtg-request at list.ee.ethz.ch?subject=unsubscribe
> Archive     http://www.ee.ethz.ch/~slist/mrtg
> FAQ         http://faq.mrtg.org    Homepage     http://www.mrtg.org
> WebAdmin    http://www.ee.ethz.ch/~slist/lsg2.cgi
> 

-- 
-------------- -- ---- ---- --- - - - -  -  -- -  -  -  -   -     -
Tony Bourke				tony at vegan.net


--
Unsubscribe mailto:mrtg-request at list.ee.ethz.ch?subject=unsubscribe
Archive     http://www.ee.ethz.ch/~slist/mrtg
FAQ         http://faq.mrtg.org    Homepage     http://www.mrtg.org
WebAdmin    http://www.ee.ethz.ch/~slist/lsg2.cgi