Performance testing monitoring solutions

Monitor Rally

Article from ADMIN 07/2012

By Christoph Siess

Performance is very much a hot topic in monitoring environments. In this article, we look at some Nagios performance benchmarks and compare Nagios with some other monitoring alternatives.

The Nagios environment [1] contains a large number of components that cooperate to provide a platform for monitoring IT systems.

Starting with the Nagios core, which is responsible for running checks and triggering notifications, through visualization solutions like Nagvis and trend detection tools, the various parts of the Nagios environment all have to mesh.

Each one of these tools generates a different load, and each tool requires different approaches for removing bottlenecks and improving performance.

A full analysis of all the Nagios components and the way they cooperate would be extremely time consuming. In an effort to understand Nagios performance, I decided to focus on the most important part of the monitoring solution: the Nagios core. I considered Nagios from the viewpoint of a simplified system. This is a practical test – or to be more precise, a gray box test – that ignores the internal workings of the core.

Figure 1 shows the system I will analyze in this article. The Nagios core in the middle is the central component. The objective of the following series of tests is to make more precise statements about the core's behavior in various deployment scenarios.