Nagios Core on VMs

[sylvesterc]

I have searched forums and other available sources about Nagios Core on virtualized environment. There are many posts, but looks like I missed general pieces of advice, if they were posted.

Are there any concise recommendations on using Nagios on specific hypervisors/virtualization technologies for optimal performance? Wherever possible, I prefer using VMs, for better scalability and mobility. Personally, I prefer KVM, but any typical VM settings for other platforms would be fine to see as well.

-- Sylvester

[tmcdonald]

In-house we use ESX, and we see a lot of our customers and the community in general using that as well. Ideally it shouldn't matter too much as the OS is what Core cares about. As long as you follow general best practices for VMs such as keeping the ratio of physical cores to virtual cores in check, etc. you should be fine.

Someone please feel free to correct me if I am wrong, or add any extra info. I'm not a VM admin, just a user.

[sylvesterc]

@tmcdonald Indeed, more information about administrative part would be great to know. In general, guest OS should behave similarly under different hypervisors, but this is imperfect world and there might be differences.

-- Sylvester

[tmcdonald]

We don't really have any hard statistics on hypervisor comparisons. The technology is mature enough at this point, and software is abstracted enough (software running on an OS running on a hyper) that the details of the KVM shouldn't matter unless you are dealing with code specifically related to a VM. I think this question is more related to hypervisors in general that it is to Nagios.

[eloyd]

Come to Nagios World Conference 2014 in St. Paul and sit in on my talk on using Nagios Core on AWS boxes.

But seriously, you can get away with a very small instance - Nagios doesn't take that much - but it will all depend on what you're monitoring. And if you're cloud-basing your server, then you may want to consider how much bandwidth you're using, disk, and CPU cycles, since all of these things will most likely factor into cost per hour of providing monitoring.

One trick is to build a Nagios box that monitors important things during a particular timeframe (say, business hours) , and only fire it up during the timeframe. This way, you're only paying for the box to monitor stuff when it is actually being monitored.

With a modern cloud service, you can automate the turn on and turn off part of a box, giving you the ability to separate day stuff from night stuff from 24-hour stuff (for instance) and grow accordingly.

[This may have been overkill for what you were looking for, but I love me some AWS-based Nagios.]

[scottwilkerson]

Thanks Eric!

[sylvesterc]

Come to Nagios World Conference 2014 in St. Paul and sit in on my talk on using Nagios Core on AWS boxes.

But seriously, you can get away with a very small instance - Nagios doesn't take that much - but it will all depend on what you're monitoring. And if you're cloud-basing your server, then you may want to consider how much bandwidth you're using, disk, and CPU cycles, since all of these things will most likely factor into cost per hour of providing monitoring. [...]

Thanks, Eric. Of course, AWS is the biggest of them all at the moment and with most developed low-level API, as well. However, any cloud hosting provider with API powerful enough to launch/stop instances remotely will do, methinks.

I can't participate in the conference, however, I suppose there will be records /documents available post factum. Good luck!

-- Sylvester

[eloyd]

Well, the nice thing about AWS is the free tier. Google's new cloud compute doesn't have one. Neither does Rackspace. And don't get me started on Azure. AWS's EC2 is a nice intro to cloud-based computing, and it's quite well suited for running a modestly medium-sized Nagios instance.

[tmcdonald]

Did that answer your question, sylvesterc?

[sylvesterc]

Did that answer your question, sylvesterc?

Not completely (the mentioned differences still might be stumbled upon), but in general, yes.

If I detect any incompatibilities, I'll post that information on the forum.

Thanks to everyone responded.

-- Sylvester