You are going to have a rough time working out the requirements for Observium as there are a lot of factors that will influence your own requirements. A lot of it will come down to the devices you are monitoring, how fast they responding to the SNMP (Some devices are significantly faster than others), the volume of syslogging, if you are running other plugins (smokeping, etc.).

 

(Speed of SNMP response will determine how long the poller will be stuck on a single device and hence  how much CPU using.)

                                                                                                                                                                                         

In today’s age if you are fretting over I/O from your SAN you are doing it all wrong. With the pricing of SSD’s dropping as much as they have running a SAN on older tech such as SAS & SATA is just asking for a disaster and terrible density.

 

That said, grab yourself a nice dual E5-2630 V3, 64-128GB of RAM and a nice set of SSD’s [i.e. 4-8 256GB (or larger, avoid the 128GB as you will take a performance hit) Samsung 850 Pros], setup Ubuntu with software RAID (you get to use trim that way) and you will be off running like a bat out of hell for less than 5K and on a system that will handle a huge volume of servers/devices/ports.

 

Once you begin to saturate the above machine you bring on a 2nd one of similar specs (maybe more RAM, less drives) and move MySQL to another host to offload all that work load.

 

Once you outgrow the above, you will likely need to upgrade CPU on the Observium machine in which case you either buy another server or simply drop in something like an E5-2650 V3 into the existing machine(s).

 

The initial Dual E5-2630 V3 will take you a long way though, very long way.

 

Good luck!

 

-Lane

 

From: observium [mailto:observium-bounces@observium.org] On Behalf Of Morten Guldager
Sent: November 11, 2014 3:11 PM
To: Observium Network Observation System
Subject: Re: [Observium] Performance

 

Yeah I read that page too. But I'm uncertain how linear observium scales. 10 cores will be doable, but how much RAM will it take then. Guess I will have to use rrdcached to keep the disk IOs on a manageable level. The server guys will probably complain if I suck every available IO ops out of their SAN.

 

 

 /Morten

 

On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 4:22 PM, Spencer Gaw <spencerg@frii.net> wrote:

I'm not sure how current this information is but it may answer some of your questions: http://www.observium.org/wiki/Hardware_Scaling

Regards,

SG



On 11/11/2014 5:55 AM, Morten Guldager wrote:

'Aloha!

I'm in the process of evaluating observium for my organisation's needs. We have some instances running already, but my task is to do the evaluation in a more structured way. I have some questions which I will keep in different posts to keep the threads clean.

Performance:

We are looking at a network currently consisting of 4000 devices with close to 100'000 ports. These devices are well known to observium and a subset of them got auto discovered just fine. But how about performance. Will it require vast amounts of computing power? Also, our network grows quite rapidly, might be 50% bigger 12 months ahead.

I found an old thread from July 2013 where Joe Hoh describing a complex multi server setup to scale observium to something approx 2-3 times my current needs. Will I have to go through similar "struggles" to get it working? Or has observium changed much to make it scale different than it did 1.5 year ago?

Pointers to information regarding scaling observium are most welcome.