# System Requirements

### Requirements based on device tier

NetObserv SNMP has been designed for the efficiency required to monitor large networks. To ensure smooth operation, we recommend that you don't exceed 300-500 devices per NetObserv SNMP instance. The device limit per instance really depends on the number of objects you are polling from each device. Ideally you should not poll more than 50,000 objects per NetObserv SNMP instance, which roughly corresponds to polling 400 devices with 125 polled objects per device. Here is a table to give you an idea of the number ob NetObserv SNMP instances you might want to deploy depending on the total number of devices polled:

| Polled Devices | Recommended NetObserv SNMP instances |
| -------------- | ------------------------------------ |
| 25             | 1                                    |
| 100            | 1                                    |
| 200            | 1                                    |
| 500            | 1 - 2                                |
| 1000           | 2 - 3                                |
| 2500           | 5 - 8                                |
| 5000           | 10 - 16                              |
| 10000          | 20 - 32                              |
| 20000          | 40 - 64                              |
| 30000          | 60 - 96                              |
| 40000          | 80 - 192                             |

### Required Resources

Each NetObserv SNMP instance can be run on 4GB of RAM and 4 CPUs without regularly exceeding 50% of CPU and memory usage. This data is based on the default polling interval of 1 minute and assumes roughly 50,000 objects being polled. When increasing the the polling intervall to e.g. 3 or 5 minutes, resource consumption will decrease, but not linearly, as there will be spikes during the polls and a lot of idle time once all polls are completed.

### Deployment

Each NetObserv SNMP instance should have its own IP address. It is therefore not advised to run multiple instances on the same host, unless dedicated interfaces are available. The preferred deployment in this case would be to deploy a new VM for each SNMP instance, which can then share the underlying resources of the host.


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