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Proper way to manage a large, distributed, clustered PRTG installation...

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Hello,

PRTG seems to have several frustrating limitations, particularly -

Heavy performance impact from some fairly useful sensors, including WMI, ssh custom scripts, and VMware, among others.
Associated heavy performance impact from more frequent polling intervals.
Performance issues with configuring many dependencies.
Performance issues with maintenance schedules past a certain (low) point.
Low supported sensor count on virtualized hardware.
Low supported sensor count with clustered environments, becoming progressively lower with every added cluster node.

These items, along with some other miscellaneous concerns, make me wonder how people support large PRTG deployments. Vertical scalability appears to be completely non-existent, so I assume people scale horizontally by having multiple independent PRTG clusters, each monitoring a subset of sensors or certain system types, and then consolidate monitoring data from all clusters into some kind of centralized presentation layer.

Does this sound about right? That's quite a bit of hardware required for moderate to large sized installations, especially if you're recommending physical servers. What would this presentation layer look like? The PRTG Enterprise Console? Its functionality seems limited compared to the web GUI. Can PRTG integrate with other event management consoles (for example, BMC's BPPM)? If the PRTG Enterprise Console is the only option, how do the limitations imposed on individual clusters translate to performance when managing the entirety of your monitoring environment through the EC?

How does HA and DR play into this?

Are there guidelines or best practices available for this kind of deployment? Or, more generically, is PRTG even recommended for enterprise-scale monitoring deployments?

Thanks.

cluster enterprise prtg

Created on Apr 27, 2017 6:13:26 PM

Last change on Apr 28, 2017 5:20:08 AM by Sven Roggenhofer [Paessler Technical Support]

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Hello there,

Your assumption is correct, after reaching a certain size, customers go with horizontal scaling. Due to its "compact architecture", meaning webserver-component is tied directly into the core service, the good thing is you get things up and running very quickly, but it comes with limitations regarding the vertical scalability, since the PRTG server does not do ru some sensor queries, it needs to process the results, derive actions based on the readings (react on limits, send notifications etc.), run reports, paint graphs and of course the aforementioned webserver component including the configured access rights management.

There are indeed customers running a large amount of sensors far beyond 10.000 sensors and it runs pretty well, since they use mostly SNMP-based sensors for their monitoring (and longer intervals on most sensors). Protocols like WMI and SSH are generally not the fastest, so running many sensor queries in short intervals based on those technologies doesn't make things better.

Generally you can use Enterprise Console to manage several instances of PRTG, but you need to keep in mind that there's no shared configuration base, both installations are still independent instances. There is no support for integrating other "management tools" besides that.

So long story short: For large scale monitoring using several core installations horizontally is currently some sort of a trade-off we can offer. You need to decide for yourself if you're eager to go with that or in the end need to look for a different solution.

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