Overuse of Active Monitoring(?)

Nagios
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one person told me that Im overusing active monitoring.

In my design, Im using mostly active monitoring’ via Nagios.

I am using passive monitoring (and a little active) for 27 machines but am planning on using active monitoring for 30-50 more because of security restrictions.

The location of the Nagios Monitoring Host is inside a secure area, consequently the only way I can get at the 30-50 additional machines outside the secure area is via active monitoring since I can send out of the secure area but no passive monitoring can come in.

I did NOT see anything in the documentation or user group traffic that implied that I could NOT (or should not) use more active monitoring than passive monitoring. The documentation seems to indicate that I could use all active monitoring if I decided to.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Thanks
-Lee

2

It does mention in the docs, that if you have a choice, use passive. The nagios central server can handle many more passive checks, than it can with passive. Look at it like this. You have 2000 hosts/4000 checks to make, and you have to use a 8088 PC with 16k of ram(OK I’m exagerating here). It would be easier if they where all passive checks for the nagios server, since it doesn’t have to actually spend cpu cycles to make the check. All it has to do is parse the data.

There is nothing you should be concerned about, unless you are running a really crap machine with zip for memory. Then you might want to be carefull. But if you have a powerhouse nagios box, with 1-2Gig of ram, then just try to bring it to it’s knee’. That is what I am doing, and I can’t get my box to beg for mercy yet, but believe me, it is sweating.

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nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/1_0/tuning.html

Item #4