PING pros and cons

Applications Infrastructure Monitoring
1

I have some questions regarding ping

a. im planning to add all my servers to nagios for monitoring purposes. since nagios will do "PING" on the IP address (to check if UP or down), will there be affect on all my servers? say resource utilization, memory, etc? Will it add up or slow down the performance? I believe none right?

b. in order to add and configure all IP to nagios, do I just need to add the nagios IP to the routing table of my servers? All I need is that nagios should be able to ping my servers and decide if its pingable or timeout.

thanks you

2

No. It would minimally affect your network utilization.

No. You should not need to change anything on your servers. The routers need to allow ping traffic (protocol UDP:ICMP) which is enabled by default.

HTH

3

a. how minimal? say i will adding hundreds of servers? network utlization not the utlization of my server?

b. why UDP not TCP?

thankyou

4

a) The "ping" command uses trivial resources if used in moderation. Keep the frequency of a "ping" poll to multiple servers down to minutes or hours rather than seconds.
If (and only if) the "nagios" monitoring server cannot "see" all the servers with "ping" you will indeed need to update your routing tables on the "nagios" server and every monitored server.
Depends on how your network is configured.

b) The "ping" command uses UDP protocol not TCP/IP .