Edit: I should clarify, I really liked the article and I like the unix philosophy but I'm truly interested to know what type of networks can be monitored with this approach. I work in the enterprise monitoring space and a lot of the solutions are truly horrible, but on the other hand, I'm not sure this approach would work either when you have 500K managed nodes and dealing with multiple campuses across 3 continents...
Yes, it certainly /can/ scale. In fact, a properly modularized monitoring solution /should/ be more capable of scaling if it was designed with this in mind. This is certainly the approach we've taken with our monitoring and trending components at Heroku. We don't have anywhere near 500K nodes, but the principles scale.
Edit: I should clarify, I really liked the article and I like the unix philosophy but I'm truly interested to know what type of networks can be monitored with this approach. I work in the enterprise monitoring space and a lot of the solutions are truly horrible, but on the other hand, I'm not sure this approach would work either when you have 500K managed nodes and dealing with multiple campuses across 3 continents...