This was a reccomendation by Adama not too long ago:

"Don't use a SAN. Observium is the perfect storm of worst use-case for SANs. It has lots of tiny writes all over the disk and Observium will eat up the performance of your SAN far quicker than its sticker price might indicate. You're far better off with a few SSDs or even a RAM disks, if you can fit it in.

The ports page doesn't use as much RAM as it once did, so that requirement isn't there anymore. Mostly what you need to do is keep up I/O throughput and CPU throughput to handle enough parallel threads to poll all of your devices quickly enough.

I would aim to run without rrdcached, and only look at using it if you need to. It adds additional CPU and latency to the equation, which is not usually desired.

One of the major problems of modern servers, IMO, is that the single-core clock speeds are relatively slow. For web-ui performance, you want the fastest single core speed you can get. For poller performance, you want as many cores as you can efficiently spread your poller load over. 4,000 devices might require more than 12 cores, especially if they're only 2Ghz cores.

Don't try to run Observium on a VM. The VM I/O overhead is a pain, and you'll ruin the host system for any other application. You want a high-core, high-memory, high-io dedicated server.

Something like :

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Refurbished-HP-ProLiant-DL585-G2-Web-Server-4-x-Qu...

Put a couple of SSD in that and it /should/ suffice. Though, you might want faster cores, and you might want 256GB of RAM, so you can keep the RRDs in RAM.

It's difficult to gauge performance requirements on that scale because it depends upon how the devices behave and what's monitor(able/ed) on them.

Oh, and split MySQL off onto a separate server with fewer, faster cores. It's not worth doing this with the web gui because of the latency involved in dealing with RRDs over the network, but it's definitely worth doing with MySQL."

Hope that helps you out. Check out this link as well: http://www.observium.org/wiki/Hardware_Scaling

Derek

On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 9:21 AM, Louis Bailleul louis.bailleul@phangos.fr wrote:

Hi,

I am currently pondering if it would be a sensible idea to monitor about 3000 linux boxes with Observium.

Has anybody already tried Observium on that kind of number ? Any pitfall/recommendation ?

I don't currently planned to use the alerting feature, but I would like to get historical performance metrics on the machines.

I currently monitor about 150 switches for a total of about 10000 ports with an Observium VM that is running really really fine.

Could anyone recommend something about the sizing of the hardware needed and the disk space/performance required for that ?

The servers and Observium would be located in the same datacenter but do you think that polling that amount of host would cause issues ?

Best regards, Louis

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