How would you build it?

Question

Random but I thought it might be interesting to hear from others.  If you had unlimited resources how would you build your Orion farm assuming you had 35,000 elements and growing, 200 high volume netflow interfaces, APM and Cirrus.

How many Pollers?
Would you use EOC and have multiple DBs?
What kind of hardware would you use for you DB/s?
What kind of hardware would you use for your pollers?
Would you setup a vm environment?

jeff.stewart · Answer

Network Elements 35000 Elements 
Nodes 715 Nodes 
Interfaces 36000 Interfaces 
Volumes 29 Volumes

These are estimates and are always growing.  We monitor everything on each node - all interfaces, CPU and memory.  We monitor error and traffic stats on all of them also.

We have APM 100 but currently don't use it to its fullest potential.

We have EOC and 2 DBs right now.  I'm not sure I like the setup.  I like the idea of having mutiple DBs to divide load, but I don't like having to do things in 3 places, EOC and 2 Orion machines.

Yann · Answer

Hi,

assuming you had 35,000 elements and growing

Do you know the percentage of Nodes, Volumes and Interfaces among these 35,000 Network Elements?

For the node elements, on How many of them do you plan to monitor the CPU and Memory Utilization?

For the Interface elements, on How many of them do you plan to monitor Error and/or Traffic statistics?

For APM, do you know how many monitors you will have to setup?

I just wanted to add these questions because e.g. a Polling Engine monitoring 4000 Interface elements (error + traffic) will more struggle to go above 99% for the polling completion than one that monitors
 8000 volumes.

Just to say that the amount of Network Elements does not always tell you how many Polling Engine you require.

Would you use EOC and have multiple DBs?

Are your Network Elements scattered on multiple continents or are they all in the same site?

Sorry I add more questions than answers :-).