Nagios Support Forum

Hi Team,

Can you please let us know how many IOPS we required for NagiOS XI server in VMWare for 4000 devices with 50,000 checks in a 5 minute interval and also suggest us which raid level is suitable for this environment.....

thanks in advance

Well, lets do some math. 50,000 checks on a 5 minute interval = 10,000 a minute, which is about 167 checks a second. This assumes that there is only 1 operation per check, usually, there is a bit more, at minimum most checks will cause nagios to perform the following tasks:
- write to the nagios.log file
- write performance data through rrdtool to an rrd.
- insert the check information into the database which usually includes updating the status table, inserting into the statehistory table, and some other things .
So I would assume you are looking at an absolute bare minimum of 400-500 iops in your environment.

Depending on the check, it could be much, much higher if the plugin in question performs additional i/o operations.