Collector architecture

[keithkleiman]

We currently are monitoring 1900 agents and are using 5 collectors to monitor them. I am in the process of building our new SCOM 2012 architecture and am rethinking about doing them same for my nworks architecture. I am considering rather than using collector servers with SCOM agents to act as a proxy, but instead to use two dedicated management servers to act as my collectors for the benefit of performance. My question is what kind of a performance benefit can I anticipate approximatly? Some benefit, substantial benefit? 10% 90% etc...? I would like to reduce the number of collector servers while maintaining the ability to adequatly monitor. Thanks!

[Helqasem]

Hi Keith,

Results can be variable, but a Management Server<->Collector can comfortably scale to between 1.5-to-2 times the capacity of an Agent<->Collector.

Hope this helps

[Alec King]

Hi Keith,

I would definitely recommend Management Servers, instead of agents. It is difficult to put a precise number on the performance increase; but because Management Servers write direct to the SCOM database, without having to use local queue cache as an agent does, then they will perform much better.

I would say that you can definitely monitor (with full functionality) using three MgtServer-Collectors, instead of the five you have now. And that will give you headroom for some future growth also.

BTW - Our next major MP update is almost ready for beta - and that will have some huge performance and scalability improvements. I'll be dropping you a line about our beta program very soon!

Regards
Alec

[keithkleiman]

Thanks Hani and Alec

[nico.weytens]

just a quick reply,
We also moved away from regular collectors/agents to Management Servers a while back, and have changed the amount of objects 1 collector can handle from 5000 to 12500.
The MSs HW spec is 2 vCPUs and 8GB of RAM.

We're still on 2007 R2 though, but hope it helps.

[keithkleiman]

Nico, Appreciate you sharing your experience. Thanks again! Keith