On Tue, 26 Sep 2017 19:25:57 +0000 "William Daly - Network Specialist, VUSD Technology" WilliamD@VUSD.SolanoCOE.K12.CA.US wrote:

I was curious as to the disk space usage that NAV will potentially use?

In our experience, most of today's "normally" sized drives are ridiculously large for a NAV installation. I/O throughput is usually more important than storage space.

How far back will it keep data for?

Data logs, such as ARP and CAM (Machinetracker) records, event&alert history, Radius accounting logs, that all go into PostgreSQL, are kept indefinitely - unless you set up the `navclean` cronjob to delete old entries (which users do, either to comply with local privacy regulations, or to avoid database bloat or slowdowns).

Time-series data is stored in Graphite, which employs a round-robin database format. NAV's default schema suggestion is to keep data for no more than 600 days; the storage requirements are only proportional to the number of metrics collected (storage space for 600 days is allocated in advance for each collected metric). These numbers can be adjusted in your Carbon configuration.

I got ours up and running last week. We have roughly 550 nodes.

Let's do the numbers game.

The largest installation I currently have access to, monitors 854 nodes with nearly 49K ports (64K interfaces in total).

The PostgreSQL database currently has ARP and CAM logs for the past two years, with an event history spanning back 5 years, and has grown to 84GB on disk (lots of indexes and unused space here, though; a dump of this database is only 26GB).

It currently stores 1.150.856 Graphite metrics (some of which may be outdated), which occupy approximately 52GB on disk.

Hope this helps :)