Nagios and Fruity: What Is Their Monitoring Potential for Your Network?
Jonathan Krein
This article will provide a brief introduction to
Brigham Young University's (BYU) implementation of Nagios and Fruity
and present what I have learned about how these monitoring applications
perform on both a dedicated server and in a virtual environment. In this
article, I will describe the limits of Nagios and how its performance
varies depending on platform. With the data presented here, you should be
better able to project growth potential for a Nagios-Fruity implementation
in your own network.
At BYU, the production versions of Nagios and Fruity
are housed together on a single dedicated server. In fact, BYU's
network has traditionally been hardware based. However, because of the
benefits of virtual servers, our network is beginning to move in the
virtual direction. Such a move raises several important questions for
Nagios and Fruity:
- Should we move Nagios and Fruity from
their dedicated hardware to a virtual environment?
- What would be the ramifications of such a
move, and what losses in performance might we incur?
- How much room would Nagios have to grow
(i.e., monitoring more hosts and services) on either of these two
platforms?
- If we did move to a virtual environment,
would we need to distribute Nagios's load over multiple servers?
- In a distributed environment, how many
servers would we need?
To answer these questions, first I will cover some
background information about Nagios and Fruity. Next, I will talk about how
these applications perform on a dedicated server.
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