Poller scalability and priority

[nisrak]

Hi,
I have a rather large Cacti installation monitoring stats from many servers. Due to security concerns, I am using custom perl scripts that collect that data using SSH rather than snmp. This obviously slows down the entire polling process. For scalability reasons, we are considering either rethinking the data collection method or slowing down the poller interval for a large number of our data sources.
My questions are:
- How much of a performance gain would we get from switching to spine if the bottleneck is forming ssh connections?
- Does cmd.php prioritize based on poller interval? (ie. if I have 2minutes worth of queries running on a 5min interval and 10 seconds worth running every 1 minute, could I have issues?)
- What other options do I have if SSH is too slow and snmp isn't secure enough?

Any input on these issues would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.
- Nisrak

[nisrak]

Any thoughts on this? At this point we are considering throwing more hardware at our Cacti installation. This is a huge waste of resources, especially if we can simply reduce the polling cycle time on a large portion of our data sources. I can't find anything about what type of scheduling/prioritizing the Cacti poller does and whether spine will give us any benefits.

Does anyone know more about this or have a suggestion about a good solution to replace SSH?

I would really appreciate any advice/input on this problem.

Thanks.
- Nisrak

[Deviloper]

Hmm, I am some sort of security guy. I did 2 print Articles on SNMP in Hakin9 and the Toolbox nad programmed the snmp-accounting-plattform for the t-com. (not the smallest company i guess ;.-)

What is your problem with SNMP? Do you have disabled SNMP on your all of your Systems?
Why not just disabling "SNMP Write Permissions" and using encrypted SNMPv3?
You can build rolebased snmp-user on any modern networking device.
So you are able to secure snmp very much.

I am polling data for 140 000 datasources in ca. 50 secs using latest spine and modified boost.

[nisrak]

One of our security guys had concerns with snmp but I suppose he did not know a whole lot about it and the changes made with v3. Maybe we dismissed snmp too quickly. I will look further into it and maybe change our data collection system. SSH is just too inefficient.

Thanks for the help!
- Nisrak