Understanding your own environment is essential for choosing the most appropriate hardware and configuration. Some users think that their environment is large when it is actually small or medium. What defines an environment as small, medium, or large? The numbers of each of these—items and vps, hosts, users, and events—are important factors in the evaluation.
If our focus here is on performance, the most important information we need is directly related to the reading and writing rates we want to achieve in our environment. According to Zabbix SIA, a very big environment is an environment that has more than 10,000 monitored hosts and a small environment has up to 20 hosts. We have a good difference between sizes, but we must remember that the amount of hosts does not directly reflect the number of values per second of the environment.
Consider that we have 1,000 hosts, each host has 60 items, and each item is updated every 60 seconds. So, we will have a vps of 1,000. If we had 100 hosts, each host had 600 items, and each item was updated in 60 seconds, again we would have had a vps of 1,000.
This means that the number of hosts alone does not define the environment size.
From experience within the projects in which we participate, we understand that environments can be classified according to other factors, such as these:
- Average (or maximum) number of online users in the Zabbix GUI: These users are most likely accessing the data on the Zabbix database and competing with the internal processes.
- Average number of events generated in the environment per second: This seems irrelevant, but in reality, it becomes a headache if not controlled and considered. We should remember that events are available for users who are online.
- VPS: No doubt, this is the main Zabbix indicator for determining the environment size. A superficial analysis might just be the only indicator for this assessment.
- Average length of retention of items, trends, and events: This will set the amount of data that online users can access via the GUI. It will directly impact the housekeeping tasks.
Based on this information, it is clear that we can't rely on a single metric to set the environment size and, based on that, set the appropriate hardware to guarantee the performance of Zabbix.