[Orca-users] Re: How many orca installations

[duclosd at post.ch]

Hi again,

	Allen Eastwood [mixal at swbell.net] wrote:
> I'm not sure what your point is about running something on every host.
> With any performance collection tool, and I've had to evaluate several,
> you have to run some sort of collection process on each machine for
> which you want data.
> 
Well, in the MRTG setup I have now, one machine ssh's to the others every 5 minutes
to collect the data, there isn't anything installed on the remote hosts. But then I don't
have all hosts setup yet and I do wonder how much load this will create on the MRTG
server and on the network when it's querying 60 hosts every 5 minutes about 8-10
different performance criteria. What I like is that there are no dependencies that bind
the monitored hosts. They don't mount anything, transfer anything or otherwise do
anything that could go wrong and affect their functioning. 
What looks nice about orca is the way it displays the data according to host or data type,
so you can compare in different ways (between hosts, between performance criteria).

> So, yes, you will have to install the SE toolkit and Orca on each host.
> If you want, you can have the data files sent to a central host for
> processing.  Personally, I prefer to have each client generate its own
> graphs and then I send them to a central web server.  We have over 100
> boxes currently running this setup.
> 
How heavy is SE toolkit? Does it install cleanly? These are in large part productive
systems where I can't risk negative effects on the application. They are also managed
by a large number of people and it's difficult to ensure homogeneous setups.
How heavy is the graph generation?

> To make things easier, I would recommend that you you make a package
> with the SE toolkit and Orca and the configuration you want.  We also
> use this and it works great, especially since we have it as part of our
> custom jumpstart.
> 
Yes, that sounds like a good recommendation. Then I guess it's rather up to me whether
the installation is clean. :-)  I think I'll try this on some test systems. Does it take a while
to get all this setup? Or do the sample config files pretty much do what you need?

Freundliche Grüsse

Darie Duclos
Unix System Spezialistin

Die Schweizerische Post
Postfinance
Systembereitstellung PF55
Engehaldenstrasse 37
CH-3030 Bern

Telefon	+41 (0)31 338 53 78
Fax	+41 (0)31 338 25 07
E-Mail	duclosd at post.ch