With the coming release of NEMS 1.3, the retroactive stats system was implemented to allow me a way to see how many systems have been upgraded, and if any are having trouble.

Now, behind the scenes, I also developed the anonymous stats system as a way for me to gauge system load on various platforms.

Why would I do that? Because NEMS is branching out onto other SBC’s, starting with the ODROID XU4.

The fact remains, I often get the question “How many hosts can I add to NEMS” and the truth is, I have no idea! I’ve received great feedback from users who are monitoring 100+ hosts on a Raspberry Pi NEMS server, but otherwise I don’t really know much about what’s actually going on in the real world of NEMS.

So the stats system shows me, anonymously, how NEMS is being used, and how it is performing.

So, that system has been running for a few days, and today I began seeing some alerts: some users have bad SD cards!

This is causing their NEMS server to run very, very slowly.

If your NEMS server is running slowly, you may be one of these! Remember, the stats are anonymous, so I can’t contact you.

I’ve considered making the stats system able to send back a response to your NEMS server… that way, even though it’s anonymous and I don’t know who you are, I can have the system programmatically warn you that your card is failing.

It’s really quite cool for me to see how NEMS is being used. So far more than 100 NEMS servers have reported in with their current statistics, and many are running more than 100 nagios monitors with a 0.01 load average.

So back to my comment about branching out to other SBCs and knowing how many hosts we can handle on NEMS: the fact is, now that I will have real world statistical data, I will be able to put together proper information about how many services can be running on NEMS on various platforms! It’ll start with the Pi 3 obviously, but I’ll be able to see for example, how a NEMS server with 500 hosts has a higher load than one with 100, so we can therefore recommend if you have 500 hosts or more, you should install on an ODROID XU4 (for example). I’ll also be creating new graphs that show comparisons of various platforms, performance graphs over time, averages based on user deployments, and so-on. Really exciting stuff!

Thanks for using NEMS! If you have any questions, I’m here for you!

Robbie