DEX Capacity Plan

Capacity Planning is the proactive practice of checking your IT environments' current endpoint usage and forecast when they will run out of resources. The main objective is to prevent performance drops or system crashes before they happen.

The metrics collected by BigFix relate directly to capacity planning. The administrator uses the data points to evaluate the following:
  • Storage Capacity
  • Compute Capacity (CPU and GPU)
  • Memory Capacity
  • Infrastructure/Network Capacity

Strategies used

When doing capacity planning, the following approaches are followed:

  • Lead Strategy
  • Lag Strategy
  • Match Strategy
Note: For the initial, limited availability release, only the POC or the 50K-device scenarios should be considered.

Scenario for a POC/small test environment

In a POC scenario, an environment with <= 100 devices is considered. It is supposed to be operational for 7 days at most, with 1 or 2 UI concurrent users. In a POC scenario, the RootServer DEX Plugin, NATS Server, 1 DEX FillDB, the DEX Server, and the DEX MSSQL database are collocated on the same Windows machine as the Root Server, the Platform database (BFEnt), and the BigFix UI.

Scenario for small to medium-size environments – up to 50K devices

Even though the DEX FillDB, as well as the RootServer DEX Plugin, is meant to be horizontally scalable, the DEX backend components are suggested to be deployed in one single node to reduce the TCO.

This configuration can be then extended by providing additional nodes with the DEX FillDB, while the RootServer Plugin will be able to scale on the TLR in the next releases.

This leads to the following capacity plan in case of 50K devices, where the RootServer Plugin is installed on the Root Server machine and the DEX FillDB, NATS, and DEX Server are collocated in one single Windows node, while the BigFix UI server can be collocated with the Root Server system, increasing the capacity requirements as explained below.