[hobbit] Loadbalancing Hobbit Server

[Henrik Stoerner]

On Mon, Feb 12, 2007 at 02:02:16PM -0500, Prasad, Ram (GE, Corporate, consultant) wrote:

> I would like to implement hobbit collecting data from lot of hosts.
> Considering that, is there a way to load balance or distribute the
> monitoring across multiple hobbit servers ?

Not in the current (4.2.0) version, but some work has been done for the
next release. Hobbit *is* designed to have only one server that has full
knowledge of the current status of each system being monitored, but you
can distribute various components of Hobbit onto other servers:

* Network tests can be distributed among multiple servers - typically
  you will have a network test server that handles a specific part of
  your network topology. E.g. one network test server for the DMZ
  systems, and another for your internal-only servers. This is available
  in 4.2.0.

* History logs and RRD files - i.e. the Hobbit modules that need to
  store data on disk - can be distributed among multiple servers.
  Hobbit will automatically send updates to the correct server, and
  fetch data from the server holding it when generating webpages.
  This also applies to the client-data logs that are stored when
  a critical event occurs. (4.3.0)

* Client data analysis can be performed on any server. Hobbit can
  feed the client data to any server capable of doing this. (4.3.0)

BTW, the stuff listed as present in the next (4.3.0) release is already
in the current snapshot, and at least the RRD load balancing is in
production use now.

But before you start planning to deploy large farms of Hobbit servers to
handle all of your hosts, do a trial installation and see what the load
on your Hobbit servers will be. At work, I have single servers handling 
over 3000 hosts - and a 5 year old Hobbit server handles it just fine.
The only task we've split off is the RRD updates, since the disk system
on our Hobbit server couldn't handle the flood of RRD file updates (we
have about 25000 RRD files being updated every 5 minutes).


Regards,
Henrik