Blogs on Netdata

Native macOS Monitoring: Logs, Sensors, GPU & Hardware Health

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve overhauled macOS monitoring in the latest Netdata release. Netdata already collects system metrics on Macs at per-second resolution; this release completes the picture with logs and hardware telemetry, areas that previously required users to run CLI tools like log show and powermetrics. The new collectors read this data through Apple’s own frameworks, allowing users to trace application and OS errors and catch hardware issues early.

Fleet Observability: Linux Edge Device Monitoring

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It feels less like managing devices and more like remote babysitting. You check the dashboard, everything is green, and then a customer in the field tells you a device has been down for two days. At a handful of servers, the rare failure is an event. Across thousands of distributed Linux endpoints — robots in warehouses, EV chargers across a city, kiosks in retail, IoT gateways in the field — the rare failure becomes a daily occurrence, and the tools built for a datacenter quietly stop telling you the truth.

Real Time Network Monitoring: Topology, NetFlow, SNMP

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Interface counters tell you a port is busy. Bytes in, bytes out, errors, drops. That’s enough to know a link is saturated, but not enough to know which conversations are saturating it, which devices are involved, or how a problem propagates across your network. For that you’ve traditionally needed dedicated network performance monitoring tools, usually expensive, usually a separate console from the rest of your monitoring.

Today we’re closing that gap. Netdata has had solid network interface monitoring for a long time through its native collectors and SNMP support. We’ve now built out the rest of the picture, and it adds up to NPM-class network monitoring: live network topology, NetFlow and sFlow traffic analysis, SNMP device monitoring across 200+ vendor profiles, SNMP trap handling, and a dedicated network monitoring dashboard. All of it runs alongside the infrastructure, application, and container metrics Netdata already collects, on the same timeline, in the same platform.

5 Best SolarWinds Alternatives for 2026

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

As organizations modernize their infrastructure and embrace cloud-native architectures, traditional monitoring solutions are showing their age. SolarWinds, while a long-established player in IT management, was designed for an era of static, on-premise infrastructure. In 2026, teams are seeking alternatives that can keep pace with dynamic, distributed systems—and they’re finding better options.

What Is SolarWinds? Is It Still The Right Choice?

SolarWinds Platform (formerly Orion) has been a cornerstone of IT monitoring for decades, offering comprehensive coverage of network devices, servers, applications, and databases. It’s particularly strong in traditional enterprise environments with extensive hardware monitoring needs.

SolarWinds Price Increases 2026: What Customers Need to Know

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re a SolarWinds customer facing renewal, you’ve likely noticed significant changes to pricing and licensing terms in 2024-2025. You’re not alone. At Netdata, we’ve been speaking with dozens of SolarWinds customers who are reassessing their monitoring strategies in light of these changes. This post provides factual information about what’s changed, the real impact on organizations, and a practical framework for evaluating your path forward.

What’s Happening with SolarWinds Pricing?

In February 2025, SolarWinds was acquired by private equity firm Turn/River Capital in a $4.4 billion transaction. As is common with PE-backed acquisitions, this has led to significant changes in pricing and business terms. Based on customer reports and public information, renewal prices have increased by 100-300% for many customers. One customer on the SolarWinds community forum reported their renewal more than doubled, a 225% increase from the previous year.

High Cardinality Metrics At Scale: A Better Playbook

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The “high cardinality is expensive” sentence has become observability’s version of “in this economy”: said so often that nobody questions whether it’s true. Every vendor pricing page invokes it. Every glossary article repeats it. Every architecture diagram shows aggregation buffers placed before the storage layer.

“High cardinality is expensive” is not a fact about the universe; it’s a fact about one architectural choice: centralizing time-series storage and querying it through an index that scales with unique series. Once you accept that choice, everything follows. You pay per metric, you drop labels you wish you’d kept, you pre-aggregate before storage, and you discover that the bug you were debugging only existed at the full resolution you already threw away.

Netdata Skills: Teach Your AI Coding Agent To Monitor

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a growing ecosystem of AI coding agents: Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, Codex, Gemini CLI, Windsurf, and others. They’re good at writing code, but they don’t inherently know how to instrument that code for observability, configure monitoring infrastructure, or troubleshoot production systems using real telemetry data. That knowledge lives in documentation, runbooks, and the heads of your senior SREs.

We’ve open-sourced a repository that encodes this knowledge into a format AI agents can use directly. netdata/skills is a collection of agent skills, published in the open agentskills.io format, that teach AI coding agents how to set up Netdata, instrument applications with OpenTelemetry, build collector pipelines, troubleshoot 49 specific technologies, and verify everything against live data via MCP.

OpenTelemetry and Netdata, Today

Fri, 15 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

OpenTelemetry has become the default way to instrument applications and ship telemetry. The hard part has never been the data model. It’s been picking a backend that handles OTLP without quietly turning into a per-metric bill or a black box that swallows your data.

Netdata is a native OTLP backend. Stand up an OpenTelemetry Collector with any of its hundreds of receivers, point its OTLP exporter at Netdata, and you get per-second charts, ML anomaly detection on every signal, AI-assisted troubleshooting, and infrastructure correlation, with no per-metric, per-series, or per-host charges. Metrics and logs work today. Trace support is coming soon.

Dashboard Playlists: Cycle Through Dashboards in TV Mode

Tue, 12 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When we shipped TV mode, we heard almost immediately: “Great, but I have five dashboards and one screen.” A single dashboard on a wall display covers one view of your infrastructure. If you want to rotate between your network overview, database health, application metrics, and infrastructure summary, someone has to walk over and click, or you’re buying more screens.

Dashboard playlists solve this. You can now select a sequence of dashboards to cycle through in TV mode, with a configurable rotation interval. Set it up once, open the TV mode URL on your display, and the screen rotates through your chosen dashboards on its own.

Azure Local Migration: Monitor Both Sides In One View

Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

More organizations are moving workloads from Azure public cloud to Azure Local (formerly Azure Stack HCI) than most people realize. The reasons vary: data sovereignty requirements, latency-sensitive workloads that need to be closer to the edge, cost optimization for predictable workloads where reserved cloud capacity doesn’t make financial sense, or regulatory constraints that require data to stay on-premises.

Geo Maps: See Where Your Infrastructure Lives

Sat, 09 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When your infrastructure is spread across regions, data centers, branch offices, or edge locations, knowing where a node is physically located matters more than people usually admit. During an incident, “the node in the Singapore POP” communicates faster than a hostname. When you’re planning capacity, seeing geographic clustering tells you something that a flat list of nodes doesn’t. When a subset of your fleet starts misbehaving, the first question is often “is this regional?”

NVIDIA DCGM Collector: Deep GPU Monitoring For AI

Mon, 04 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

GPU infrastructure is expensive and increasingly central to production workloads. Whether you’re running ML training jobs, inference serving, video transcoding, or HPC workloads, understanding what your GPUs are actually doing, and what’s going wrong when performance degrades, is not optional. The problem is that NVIDIA’s Data Center GPU Manager (DCGM) exposes an enormous amount of telemetry, but getting that data into a monitoring system in a useful, organized way has traditionally required significant setup and custom dashboarding work.

Misconfigured Alert Detection: Tuning Made Easy

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Netdata ships with hundreds of stock alerts. They cover a wide range of infrastructure conditions and they’re designed with sensible defaults. But “sensible defaults” and “correct for your environment” are not the same thing. A CPU threshold that’s perfectly reasonable for a build server might generate constant noise on a machine running batch jobs. An alert that’s critical for production might be irrelevant in staging, where it fires daily and everyone ignores it.

Azure Monitor Collector: Monitor Azure Infrastructure

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re running infrastructure on Azure, you’ve probably dealt with the split between your Azure-native monitoring and the rest of your stack. Your VMs, databases, and Kubernetes clusters generate platform metrics through Azure Monitor, but those metrics live in a separate world from the OS-level, application, and on-prem metrics you’re already watching in Netdata. You end up checking two (or more) places during incidents, building mental bridges between dashboards that don’t talk to each other.

Database Performance Monitoring: 14+ DBs Supported

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Netdata has always collected database metrics: connections, throughput, replication lag, buffer cache hit ratios, and so on. These tell you that something is wrong, but they don’t tell you why. When your PostgreSQL response time spikes, the metric alone doesn’t tell you which query is responsible. For that, you’ve traditionally needed to SSH into the box, connect to the database, and run diagnostic queries manually. Or set up a separate database monitoring tool entirely.

Nagios Plugins: Run Existing Checks & Custom Scripts

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A lot of teams have a collection of Nagios plugins and custom monitoring scripts that have been running reliably for years. Some are standard community plugins for checking disk health or SSL certificate expiry. Others are homegrown Bash or Python scripts that check something very specific to the business: whether an API endpoint returns the right payload, whether a batch job completed on time, whether a queue depth is within bounds. These scripts work, they’re battle-tested, and nobody wants to rewrite them.

Secrets Management: Remove Credentials From Configs

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re running Netdata collectors that connect to databases, APIs, or other authenticated services, there’s a good chance you have passwords sitting in plain-text configuration files right now. It works, but it’s the kind of thing that makes security teams nervous and makes credential rotation painful. Every password change means editing config files and restarting collectors.

Netdata now supports secrets management natively. Instead of putting credentials directly in your collector configurations, you reference them using a resolver syntax, and Netdata resolves the actual values at runtime from whatever source you choose: environment variables, files on disk, the output of a command, or a centralized secret store like HashiCorp Vault or AWS Secrets Manager.

Smarter Alerts: Test, Review & Preview Schedules

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Alert fatigue usually isn’t caused by one thing. It’s the accumulation of thresholds that are slightly too sensitive, alerts that fire during known maintenance windows, and historical patterns that nobody has the tools to review easily. Fixing it requires better visibility into how alerts actually behave over time, and a way to test changes before they hit production.

We’ve shipped three improvements to alerting in Netdata that address different parts of this problem: the ability to evaluate alert definitions against historical data before deploying them, a timeline view of alert transitions, and a schedule preview for recurring silencing rules.

TV Mode: Put Your Dashboards on the Big Screen

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

One of the most common requests we’ve gotten since launching custom dashboards is deceptively simple: “How do I put this on a TV?” Teams want their dashboards on wall-mounted screens in NOCs, war rooms, and open office spaces. The dashboard is already built. The data is already there. They just need a way to display it on a screen that nobody is logged into, without exposing the full Netdata Cloud interface.

New Custom Dashboards: Metrics, Logs & Live Commands

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Custom dashboards in Netdata have always let you pull charts together on-the-fly into a single view. That’s useful, but it’s also limited. In practice, when you’re running an incident or reviewing a service, you don’t just want charts. You want to see the output of top alongside your CPU metrics. You want slow query logs next to your database latency charts. You want an infrastructure summary card that tells you how many nodes in a room are healthy without having to click through to find out.

Alert Acknowledgement: Mark It as Seen, Keep Working

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you’ve ever opened the alerts tab during a busy period, you know the problem. There are alerts you’ve already looked at, alerts someone on your team is handling, and alerts that fired on a known issue that’s being worked on. They all sit together in the same list alongside the new ones you haven’t seen yet. There’s no way to say “I’ve seen this, move on” without silencing or disabling the alert entirely, which is a much heavier action than the situation calls for.

Expanded Chart View: Investigate Without Leaving the Chart

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Charts in Netdata have always been interactive. You can zoom, pan, select time ranges, and see per-second granularity across thousands of metrics. But when you spotted something interesting, the next steps usually meant leaving the chart: opening another tab to check a related metric, navigating to the correlation tool, or pulling up a different time range for comparison. The investigation workflow lived outside the chart, even though the chart was where the investigation started.

Conversations: Ask Netdata About Anything You're Looking At

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Netdata AI can already troubleshoot your alerts and generate Insights reports. What it couldn’t do, until now, was have a back-and-forth conversation. You could get a one-shot analysis, but you couldn’t ask follow-up questions, pull in additional context, or go from a quick question to a full investigation without starting over.

We’ve added a conversational layer to Netdata AI. You’ll notice a new blue chat icon throughout Netdata Cloud, on charts, in the alerts table, on Insights reports, and in the reports list. Click it, and you’re in a conversation where the thing you clicked on is already the context. No copy-pasting metric names, no explaining what you’re looking at.

Node Groups: Organize Infrastructure Into Views

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When you’re managing a handful of nodes, the flat list in the nodes tab works fine. When you’re managing hundreds or thousands, it becomes a wall of hostnames. You end up applying the same filters repeatedly: all the production database servers, all the nodes in eu-west, all the Kubernetes workers in the staging cluster. The filters work, but they don’t persist, and there’s no way to share them with the rest of your team.

Introducing the Netdata Cloud MCP Server

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Netdata Cloud MCP Server is now available — giving AI agents and assistants direct access to your Netdata through a single endpoint at app.netdata.cloud/api/v1/mcp.

AI Is Changing How We Monitor Infrastructure

If you’re an engineer in 2026, chances are AI is already part of your daily workflow, whether that’s a general-purpose assistant like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini that you bounce questions off, or a coding agent like Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or Windsurf that writes and debugs code alongside you. These tools are incredibly powerful, but until now, they’ve been blind to what’s actually happening on your infrastructure.

Howard Conference & Expo 2026: Smarter Observability

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Netdata team will be at the Howard Conference and Expo “Game On” event, February 24-26, 2026 at the Grand Hotel Marriott Resort in Fairhope, Alabama. We’re looking forward to meeting IT leaders and practitioners to talk about real-time observability—what it actually looks like in practice, and where traditional monitoring falls short.

What We’ll Be Showing

Stop by our booth to see Netdata in action and chat with our team about what you’re dealing with in your own environment.

India DevOps Show 2026: Modern Observability Recap

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

DevOps has fundamentally transformed how organizations build and deliver software. But as deployment velocity increases and infrastructure becomes more dynamic, the gap between shipping code and truly understanding system behavior continues to widen. Teams need observability that keeps pace with their pipelines, not tools that slow them down or break the budget.

Netdata is proud to participate as a Silver Partner at the 10th Edition India DevOps Show 2026, taking place on February 13, 2026 at Aloft ORR Hotel, Bengaluru. We’re excited to engage with India’s vibrant DevOps community and share our vision for efficient, intelligent observability.

Tech Show London 2026: Cloud & AI Observability Recap

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The intersection of cloud and AI is creating unprecedented infrastructure complexity. As organizations race to deploy AI workloads alongside traditional cloud services, the demand for intelligent, high-fidelity observability has never been greater. Understanding what’s happening across your entire stack, in real time, is no longer a luxury, it’s a necessity.

That’s why the Netdata team is excited to be part of Tech Show London 2025, taking place March 4-5 at ExCeL London. We’ll be in the Cloud & AI Infrastructure zone, ready to show you how modern observability should work.

Introducing Real-Time Conversations with Netdata AI

Tue, 23 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Over the past few months, we’ve seen incredible adoption of our AI Investigations and Insights reports. Teams are using them to automate the deep, thoughtful analysis required for complex post-mortems, capacity planning, and performance optimization. These comprehensive reports are fantastic when you need a well-researched, shareable document.

But what about the moments during an investigation? What about the rapid-fire “what if” questions and the quick exploration of hypotheses that happen in the heat of the moment? For that, you need speed and interactivity. You need a partner you can have a real-time dialogue with.

Text-To-Alert: Create Alerts From Natural Language

Thu, 18 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Netdata has an incredibly powerful alerting engine. But this can sometimes be a double-edged sword: the flexibility to build incredibly specific, intelligent alerts is immense, but mastering its syntax can feel like learning a new language. We’ve heard this from so many of you. You tell us that configuring alerts is often the steepest part of the learning curve, a task that falls to the one “Netdata expert” on the team who has spent the time digging through the documentation.

Monitor Everything is an Anti-Pattern!

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Bullshit and nonsense.

But let’s take it from the beginning.

The industry’s story goes something like this:

“Monitor everything is universally recognized as an anti-pattern.”
“You’ll drown in metrics, burn out your engineers, and blow your budget.”
“Just focus on 3–10 signals — the Four Golden Signals, RED, USE — and ignore everything else.”
“Trust us, you don’t want that much telemetry.”

(true, read the whole story here)

Then, in the same breath:

Gartner IOCS 2025: Tackling Observability Overspend

Fri, 07 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The observability market is facing a paradox. As organizations spend more than ever on monitoring tools, their infrastructure complexity continues to grow, and incident resolution times often remain stubbornly high. Teams are drowning in data, struggling with tool sprawl, and facing unpredictable, budget-breaking bills.

This challenge, how to gain better visibility without spiraling costs, is one of the most critical conversations for IT leaders today.

That’s why the Netdata team is heading to Las Vegas for the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies (IOCS) Conference from December 9-11, 2025. We’ll be there to discuss this challenge head-on and share our vision for a more efficient and intelligent future for observability.

ServiceNow Integration: Streamline Incident Response

Fri, 07 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

When a critical alert fires at 2 AM, the last thing your on-call engineer should be doing is manual administrative work. Yet, for many teams, that’s exactly what happens. You see the alert in your monitoring tool, then you have to switch contexts, open a new browser tab, log into your ITSM platform, and manually create an incident—all while your systems are failing.

This “swivel-chairing” between tools is slow, error-prone, and a significant drag on your Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR).

SOC 2 Type 2: Validated Security Controls Over Time

Thu, 16 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We’re excited to share that Netdata has successfully achieved SOC 2 Type 2 attestation.

Following a five-month audit conducted by Sensiba LLP, we can now confirm that our security controls work consistently in practice. The audit covered the period from April 1 to August 31, 2025, and tested whether our controls operated effectively throughout that entire timeframe.

Back in April, we announced our SOC 2 Type 1 attestation, which validated that our security controls were properly designed at a specific point in time. We also mentioned we were entering the monitoring period for Type 2. Today we can share the results.

Automate Infrastructure Analysis With AI Reports

Tue, 23 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The least exciting part of an operations or SRE role is often the manual, repetitive task of generating reports. It’s the Monday morning scramble to summarize weekly infrastructure health for the team, or the end-of-quarter push to build a capacity planning document. This is boilerplate work that pulls you away from critical engineering tasks.

We believe that if a process is repeatable, it should be automated.

That’s why we’re introducing Scheduled AI Investigations and Insights. This new capability builds directly on our existing AI tools, allowing you to set your most important analyses on a recurring schedule. It’s like setting up a cron job for your infrastructure reporting, letting your Co-SRE do the heavy lifting for you.

AI Troubleshooting GA With On-Demand Credits

Tue, 02 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Since launching our AI investigations and insights in a research preview, one thing has become clear: automated root cause analysis delivers a significant return on investment. Teams have confirmed that instant insights don’t just save a few minutes; they fundamentally shorten incident response cycles, free up valuable engineering hours, and reduce the business impact of downtime.

The preview successfully demonstrated this value, with 10 free AI sessions per month allowing teams to integrate AI into their workflows. Now, based on the success and maturity of the capabilities, we are proud to announce that Netdata’s AI investigations and insights are graduating from research preview to General Availability.

Save Hours on Troubleshooting with Automated Investigations

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

How many times has your team stared at a dashboard, pointed to a spike, and asked a question that charts alone can’t answer? “What was the real impact of that deployment?” “Why are our Kubernetes pods in the us-east-1 cluster suddenly crashing?” “Are we wasting money on overprovisioned servers?”

Answering these questions is the real work of operations and SRE. It often kicks off a time-consuming scramble, sending engineers down rabbit holes for hours, days, or even weeks. You dig through logs, correlate metrics across services, and piece together clues from Slack conversations and Jira tickets.

Netdata Now Troubleshoots Your Alerts for You

Sun, 03 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The 2 AM pager alert. For anyone in Ops, SRE, or IT administration, those words trigger a familiar sense of dread. An alert has fired. Is it a real fire, or another false alarm waking you from a dead sleep? The pressure is on. Every minute of downtime costs money and reputation, but troubleshooting a complex system when you’re sleep-deprived is a Herculean task.

This cycle is a massive drain on engineering resources. The daily grind of sifting through alerts, trying to distinguish signal from noise, and manually correlating metrics to find a root cause consumes countless hours. This constant firefighting leads to alert fatigue, where even critical notifications start to get ignored. The core questions are always the same: Is this a real problem? What is the potential impact? Why did this trigger? What do I do next? Answering them is a slow, manual, and often stressful process.

Netdata Implements MCP Protocol

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Update (February 2026): Netdata now also provides MCP via Netdata Cloud at app.netdata.cloud/api/v1/mcp for infrastructure-wide access (Business/Homelab plan). See MCP documentation for details.

We are excited to announce that Netdata has officially implemented the Model Context Protocol (MCP), joining the forefront of AI-powered infrastructure monitoring.

By enabling direct connections between AI assistants and your data sources and tools, the Model Context Protocol is a new open standard that builds a crucial link between artificial intelligence and practical systems. Instead of the AI providing generic suggestions that don’t understand your environment, MCP enables it to communicate and then interact with your infrastructure data in real time. Being among the first monitoring platforms to adopt this groundbreaking protocol, Netdata is at the forefront of intelligent observability. With the help of this integration, traditional monitoring becomes a dialogue that your entire technical team is able to participate in. We encourage you to dive deeper into the technical foundations of MCP, explore Anthropic’s comprehensive explanation, and discover how this protocol is reshaping the future of AI-data interaction.

Introducing Netdata Insights

Tue, 27 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve been thinking a lot about synthesis lately.

Netdata already samples every metric every second at the edge. Engineers told us the remaining pain point was synthesis, the ability to pull hours or days or months of high‑resolution time‑series into a concise explanation they could hand to a teammate (or use themselves to debug faster).

You know the pattern. An incident happens, and suddenly you’re context-switching between dozens of dashboards, trying to reconstruct a timeline. Or you need to write a capacity planning report, and you’re copy-pasting screenshots into slides, manually correlating trends across different retention windows. The raw data is there, but the synthesis step (the part where you turn metrics into narrative) doesn’t scale.

SOC 2 Type 1: Committed To Security & Trust

Fri, 16 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We are pleased to announce that Netdata has successfully achieved SOC 2 Type 1 attestation!

Following an independent examination performed by AssuranceLab CPAs LLC, the report confirms that—as of April 25, 2025—the design of Netdata’s controls meets the Security, Availability, and Confidentiality Trust Services Criteria defined by the AICPA.

At Netdata, the security and integrity of the monitoring data our users entrust to us are paramount. This significant milestone, validated through a rigorous, independent third-party audit conducted by AssuranceLab, formally attests to the robustness of our security controls and practices as designed and implemented at a specific point in time.

Monitoring Netdata Restarts: A Reliable Solution

Thu, 06 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

For a tool like Netdata, monitoring crashes and abnormal events extends far beyond bug fixing—it’s essential for identifying edge cases, preventing regressions, and delivering the most dependable observability experience possible. With millions of daily downloads, each event provides a vital signal for maintaining the integrity of our systems.

The Challenge with Traditional Solutions

Over the years, we’ve evaluated many monitoring tools, each with significant limitations:

Tool	Strengths	Limitations
Sentry	• Comprehensive error tracking features • Detailed stack traces	• Per-event pricing model becomes prohibitive at scale • Forces sampling which reduces visibility into critical issues • Compromises complete error capture for cost control
GCP BigQuery & Similar	• Powerful query capabilities • Flexible data processing • High scalability potential	• Complex reporting setup and maintenance • Significant costs at high event volumes • Requires specialized technical expertise
Other Solutions	• Various specialized features • Some open-source flexibility	• Either too inflexible for custom requirements • Or prohibitively expensive at full-capture scale • Often require compromising between detail and cost

We consistently encountered these core challenges:

Netdata vs Prometheus: A 2025 Performance Analysis

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

When it comes to infrastructure monitoring, performance, scalability, and efficiency are critical considerations. In this blog post, we revisit two widely adopted open-source monitoring solutions: Netdata and Prometheus. Both tools have introduced notable improvements in their latest versions, emphasizing scalability and enhanced efficiency.

In our previous analysis, we explored key differences between these systems, focusing on resource consumption and data retention. This follow-up expands on that comparison by subjecting both tools to a significantly larger workload. With the number of monitored nodes increased to 1000, containers to 80k, and metrics ingestion reaching 4.6 million metrics per second, we examine how each system performs under these demanding conditions, focusing on CPU utilization, memory requirements, disk I/O, network usage, and data retention during data ingestion.

Long-Term Data Storage and Retention in Netdata

Tue, 21 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Netdata’s database engine (dbengine) provides a sophisticated multi-tiered storage system designed for efficient long-term data retention while maintaining high granularity. This article explores the technical details of how Netdata handles metric storage, the advantages of its distributed architecture, and how to configure it for your specific needs.

Database Engine Architecture

Netdata’s database engine provides a sophisticated, efficient solution for long-term metric storage through:

Intelligent multi-tiered storage architecture
Efficient compression and caching mechanisms
Flexible retention strategies
Distributed deployment options

This design enables organizations to maintain detailed historical data while optimizing storage use and maintaining query performance.

Best Of Category Badges Earned In 2024: G2 & Capterra

Mon, 23 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Netdata Featured with Multiple “Best Of” Category Badges in 2024

As we are close to the end of this year, we are thrilled to announce that Netdata has been recognized with multiple “Best of” badges from Gartner Digital Markets brands: Capterra, Software Advice, and GetApp, leading software recommendation search engines.

This “Best of” badges program is an independent assessment that evaluates user reviews to help buyers identify the highest-rated software companies in specific categories that offer the most popular solutions.

Getting Started With Netdata: Real-Time Monitoring

Thu, 19 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Now you can start monitoring thousands of metrics in real-time, detecting anomalies throughout your infra, and troubleshooting issues even mid-crisis! Watch this 1-minute video for a quick intro! Get ready to be blown away!

To fully utilize Netdata for monitoring your infrastructure, do these:

① Deploy Netdata

Install Netdata to your systems.

Netdata runs on Linux, Windows, FreeBSD and MacOS and can be installed on bare-metal servers, cloud VMs, Kubernetes, even weak IoT devices. We have carefully optimized it to be the fastest and most advanced monitoring you will ever need, and at the same time be extremely friendly, polite and respectful to your production systems and applications.

Customize Your Netdata Experience with Favorites

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Make Netdata yours with Favorites

Monitoring is personal. Different systems, workloads, and use-cases mean different charts matter to different users. Netdata now makes it easier than ever to customize your experience by letting you favorite charts you care about most.

How it works

You’ll now see a heart icon next to any chart or section of charts. Click it, and it instantly gets added to your favorites. favorites appear right above your system overview metrics, so you see what matters most—first.

20 Best DevOps, SRE & Observability Conferences 2025

Wed, 04 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Every year, DevOps, SRE Sysadmin & IT leaders gather at conferences across the world to share not only knowledge but also the latest trends, tools, and strategies for achieving greater insight and control over complex systems. This guide brings you a comprehensive list of DevOps, SRE & observability events that can help you stay ahead in a rapidly evolving field. Whether you’re exploring the latest in tools, cloud observability, or AI-driven insights, this guide will lead you to the perfect event to expand your knowledge and network with industry leaders!

Native Windows Agent: Real-Time Windows Monitoring

Fri, 08 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We are pleased to announce a significant advancement in system monitoring: the launch of Netdata’s first-ever Native Windows Agent. This release represents a major step forward in our mission to provide comprehensive and efficient monitoring solutions across all platforms. With the introduction of the native Windows agent, we are extending our robust monitoring capabilities to Windows environments, enabling seamless and unified monitoring across diverse infrastructures. This development is a direct response to the needs of our user community, who have expressed a strong demand for a powerful and intuitive Windows monitoring solution.

Accurate Process Monitoring with Netdata

Mon, 04 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Understand why tracking cumulative resource consumption is crucial for accurate process monitoring.

Accurate Process Monitoring with Netdata: Why Tracking Cumulative Resource Consumption Matters

Tracking the cumulative resource consumption of processes, including short-lived and exited children, is a rare feature in monitoring tools – and it’s one of the standout capabilities Netdata offers.

Most mainstream solutions, like Datadog’s process monitoring and Prometheus’s Node Exporter, focus on active processes and only collect metrics per PID. Even specialized process monitors (top, htop, etc.) face the same limitations. They capture snapshots of currently running processes and often rely on fixed sampling intervals, which are too slow to catch very short-lived tasks. This approach falls short when trying to capture the resource footprint of dynamic applications, shell scripts, and complex process hierarchies.

Linux Load Average Myths and Realities

Sun, 03 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

When it comes to monitoring system performance on Linux, the load average is one of the most referenced metrics. Displayed prominently in tools like top, uptime, and htop, it’s often used as a quick gauge of system load and capacity. But how reliable is it? For complex, multi-threaded applications, load average can paint a misleading picture of actual system performance.

In this article, we’ll dive into the myths and realities of Linux load average, using insights from Netdata’s high-frequency, high-concurrency monitoring setup. Through this journey, we’ll uncover why load average spikes can occur even under steady workloads, and why a single metric is rarely enough to capture the true state of a system. Whether you’re a system administrator, developer, or performance enthusiast, this exploration of load average will help you interpret it more accurately and understand when it may—or may not—reflect reality.

12 Benefits You Get by Scaling with Netdata

Wed, 23 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

80% of decision-makers globally acknowledge that digital infrastructure is essential for reaching business goals. However, IT infrastructure is becoming increasingly distributed and complex. Organizations are managing hundreds—even thousands—of nodes across cloud, on-premise, and edge environments. This predicament makes effective monitoring across all systems more essential than ever. In turn, this drives the demand for valuable real-time insights through scalable monitoring solutions like Netdata.

If you’re managing a large infrastructure but haven’t fully embraced Netdata, now is the time to reconsider. Let’s take a look at the benefits you’ll get, below.

5 Best Datadog Alternatives For Monitoring & Observability

Tue, 15 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

As businesses rely more on infrastructure monitoring, observability tools have become essential for keeping systems secure, responsive, and efficient. In this evolving monitoring landscape, Datadog is known as a leading analytics and monitoring tool, capable of collecting essential performance metrics from servers, databases, applications, and other IT infrastructures. But at what cost?

What Is Datadog? Is It Your Only Option?

Datadog is a cloud-based monitoring platform that helps organizations track the performance of their infrastructure, applications, and logs. It provides visibility across systems to ensure efficient operations and identify issues quickly.

ilert Integration: Streamline Monitoring & Response

Mon, 14 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Netdata now integrates with ilert, a leading incident response platform. With this integration, the incident management features and alerting capabilities of ilert and the real-time systems monitoring provided by Netdata can be leveraged. By combining both systems, users can not only monitor their infrastructure with fine detail as never before, but also assure the responsiveness of critical alerts to the correct teams swiftly.

What is ilert?

ilert is an end-to-end platform for alerting, on-call management, and status pages, built for the new-age DevOps and SRE teams. It streamlines the entire incident management process by automating key aspects and providing powerful tools to improve efficiency, such as automated on-call duty, multi-level escalations, alert grouping, postmortem document creation, and much more. ilert integrates with monitoring systems, like Netdata, and sends alerts through multiple channels (SMS, phone, push, Slack, Microsoft Teams, etc.), ensuring that teams can promptly respond to issues before they impact service.

Important Changes to the Netdata Agent Dashboard

Mon, 12 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Important Notice: These changes ONLY impact users of the Netdata Agent Dashboard not connected to Netdata Cloud.

Dear Netdata Community,

We are writing to inform you of upcoming changes to the Netdata Agent Dashboard, which will take effect in the coming weeks. This change impacts users from the soon to be released Netdata v2.0 onwards (and also on the Netdata v1.47 nightly releases). Currently, the Open-Source Netdata Agents allow unauthorized and unlimited Agent dashboard access. From Netdata v2.0 onwards, all Netdata Dashboards (Agent and Cloud) will offer exactly the same functionality under the same policy. Netdata Agent Dashboard will use Netdata Cloud as an SSO provider, ensuring dashboard access is authenticated and validated by Netdata Cloud, users will have the option to proceed with an unauthorized local dashboard but this will no longer be the default.

Introducing Netdata's Dynamic Configuration Manager

Wed, 05 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We are thrilled to unveil the latest addition to the Netdata platform: the Dynamic Configuration Manager. This powerful new feature revolutionizes how you manage your monitoring and alerting configurations, making it easier and more efficient than ever before.

Key Features of the Dynamic Configuration Manager

Create and Modify Alerts from Every Chart
- You can now create and modify alerts directly from any chart on your dashboard or from the dedicated Alerts tab. This streamlined process allows for quick adjustments and ensures your monitoring is always aligned with your current needs.
Configure Collectors from the Integrations Section on the Dashboard
- Currently available for go.d collectors, this feature lets you configure collectors straight from the Integrations section. This means you can quickly identify what Netdata can monitor and set up your configurations in one go, without having to dig through multiple settings pages.
Submit Configurations to Multiple Nodes with One Click
- Managing configurations across a large infrastructure can be time-consuming. With the Dynamic Configuration Manager, you can now submit configurations to multiple nodes simultaneously, saving you valuable time and effort.
Construct and Copy Configurations for IaC Solutions
- For those using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) solutions, this feature allows you to construct and copy configurations easily, integrating them into your IaC workflows. This ensures your configurations are consistent and reproducible across different environments.

How to Use the Dynamic Configuration Manager

To help you get started with the Dynamic Configuration Manager, we’ve put together a quick guide using the Netdata demo environment.

How to automate adding nodes to rooms in Netdata?

Tue, 28 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

How we organize nodes (and the Netdata agents that are running on those nodes) across different rooms should reflect our architectural decision because the room is a logical container with its own user members and notification rules. So if we are monitoring large infrastructure we should be consistent with these rules and one way to achieve this is to choose automation. Netdata Cloud Terraform Provider lets you automate this by provisioning all the cloud resources and giving you the credentials to spin up the Netdata Agents. In this article, we will concentrate on how in practice we can organize and assign nodes across different rooms in two scenarios, in each of them I’m using non-production installation of the Netdata Agents:

Costa Tsaousis Interview: Homelab Show Insights

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Costa Tsaousis, founder and chief visionary of Netdata, recently shared his expertise on real-time monitoring’s pivotal role in modern IT landscapes during an episode of ‘The Homelab Show’ on YouTube. If you missed the live stream, here’s an essential summary of the discussion’s key points.

The Necessity of Real-Time Monitoring

Nowadays, data flows incessantly and operational demands are continuous, the importance of real-time monitoring cannot be overstated.

Decentralized Monitoring Explained

Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction to Distributed Observability

Users often find themselves puzzled by the concepts of decentralized or distributed monitoring. This confusion is likely due to many monitoring systems claiming distributed capabilities, making it challenging to discern how Netdata stands out.

To grasp the distinction, we must delve into the evolution of monitoring systems.

When the first monitoring systems were created, about 20-25 years ago, they were built as SNMP collectors. The monitoring application was installed on a server, configured to discover network devices via SNMP, pulling data once every minute, per device. Simultaneously, the monitoring system was exposing a daemon to collect SNMP traps (key events generated by the network devices, pushed to the monitoring system).

Netdata is the only real-time monitoring solution: Justified

Wed, 10 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In the digital era, where data flows like a ceaseless river, real-time monitoring stands as a pivotal technology, allowing organizations to not only keep pace but also to deeply understand the intricate dance of their operational ecosystems. This technology is not just about keeping tabs; it’s about gaining a profound, almost intuitive sense of the micro-worlds within which systems, containers, services, and applications pulse and thrive.

Real-time monitoring is the art and science of tracking system performance, activities, or transactions continuously and automatically, providing the ability to analyze and visualize data the moment it’s generated.

Understanding Monitoring Tools

Wed, 10 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

If you care about operational excellence when it comes to your IT infrastructure, the role of monitoring systems is pivotal. As we navigate through the myriad of available monitoring tools, it becomes essential to understand the distinct architectures, styles, and focal points of various monitoring solutions, as well as the time-to-value they offer. This blog post aims to demystify the landscape of monitoring systems, providing a comprehensive overview that categorizes these tools into four primary architectural design principles.

SafetyDetectives: An Interview-With-Costa-Tsaousis

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In a recent conversation with SafetyDetectives, Costa Tsaousis, CEO and founder of Netdata, shares insights into the inception and evolution of Netdata, a game-changing monitoring solution. With a background in fintech and a passion for real-time data processing, Tsaousis was driven to create Netdata in response to the significant gaps he identified in traditional monitoring tools. Emphasizing the importance of real-time data, comprehensive metrics collection, and the innovative use of machine learning, Tsaousis discusses how Netdata is setting new standards in the monitoring industry. His vision for Netdata not only challenges the status quo but also introduces a novel approach to cybersecurity, making it an essential tool for organizations worldwide.

Manage Netdata Cloud with Terraform

Wed, 27 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We proudly announce the release of the Netdata Cloud Terraform Provider.

It’s a step forward to make our platform more automated and compliant with the modern Infrastructure as Code approach. Terraform is one of the leaders in the IaC tools with a rich ecosystem of providers and modules, now you can put a puzzle with Netdata Cloud to your stack.

The initial iteration of the Netdata Cloud Terraform Provider supports the following resources:

Dynatrace vs Datadog vs Instana vs Grafana vs Netdata!

Sun, 17 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In this post, we delve into the comparative analysis of the commercial offerings of five leading monitoring solutions—Dynatrace, Datadog, Instana, Grafana, and Netdata. Our objective is to unravel the intrinsic value each of these services offers when applied to a real-world scenario. To accomplish this, we employed trial subscriptions of these services to monitor a set of Ubuntu servers and VMs, each hosting a pair of widely-used applications: NGINX and PostgreSQL, along with a couple of Docker and LXC containers. Additionally, we extended our monitoring to physical servers to evaluate the efficacy of these tools in capturing hardware and sensor data along with VMs monitored from the host.

New Streamlined Plan Structure

Wed, 06 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

UPDATE: Netdata is introducing a streamlined plan structure, sunsetting Early Bird plans on 13-03-2024.

As the landscape of real-time monitoring evolves, so does the diversity and complexity of use cases that our community brings to Netdata. Our mission has always been to democratize monitoring by making it accessible, powerful, and scalable for everyone. With the rapid growth of our user base and their expanding needs, it’s become clear that our plan structure must evolve to maintain this mission sustainably.

Upcoming Homelab Plan

Wed, 07 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

UPDATE: On the 2024-02-08 A new Netdata Cloud Homelab plan will become available. This is aimed for home users and students.

What you need to know?

New Plan alert: We’re introducing a dedicated plan on Netdata Cloud—the Homelab plan. It’s tailored to meet the needs of home users and students, offering unrestricted access to Netdata features without the limitations seen in the Community plan.
Exclusively for Personal Use: The Homelab plan is designed for personal, non-commercial use only. To qualify, users will need to self-certify as a home user or student during the sign-up process.

IoT Monitoring Challenges: Key Issues & How To Overcome Them

Thu, 11 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

With the increasing prevalence of IoT devices, which are being used in a wide range of applications, from smart homes and cities to industrial and agricultural systems, monitoring thei performance and health is extremely important. However, it’s essential to remember that monitoring IoT devices involves more than just tracking device-level data. In addition, monitoring data from the IoT platform or application layer is equally important.

We’ll explore some of these topics in more detail and explain how Netdata can play an essential role in the monitoring of such devices, including some hints on how it can be set up for maximum performance in such scenarios.

Introducing Netdata’s Alerts Configuration Manager

Thu, 21 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Netdata introduces its latest feature, the Alerts Configuration Manager, transforming the way users configure and manage alerts in their Netdata environment. This powerful tool integrates directly into the Netdata Dashboard, offering a streamlined and intuitive interface for both novice and experienced users.

What is the Alerts Configuration Manager?

The Alerts Configuration Manager is an innovative feature available to users with Business subscriptions. It allows for the creation and customization of alerts directly from the Netdata Dashboard, employing a user-friendly UI wizard. This tool simplifies alert configuration, making it accessible and straightforward, even for those who are not deeply technical.

Cost Transparency: The True Cost Of Monitoring

Fri, 01 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Businesses are increasingly reliant on monitoring tools to ensure the seamless performance and reliability of their systems. However, the true cost of implementing and maintaining these tools is often obscured by hidden expenses. Our previous blog delved into the concealed costs associated with various monitoring solutions, such as Prometheus & Grafana (Open Source Monitoring) and commercial platforms like Datadog, Dynatrace, and NewRelic. These costs can manifest in various forms - from complex setups and maintenance to additional charges for advanced features.

Understanding the Netdata Methodology

Sat, 04 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In the dynamic landscape of modern infrastructure and multi cloud environments, observing and understanding system performance requires a new breed of tools—ones that keep pace with the ’living’ nature of modern infrastructure. This is the inflection point at which Netdata steps in, and aims to bring a fresh perspective to monitoring.

What does Netdata do differently

There are key “cultural” faults that we believe hold the observability industry back. Let’s take a look through the prism of these faults and understand what Netdata is doing differently to address them.

Netdata Best Practices

Fri, 03 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Effective system monitoring is non-negotiable in today’s complex IT environments. Netdata offers real-time performance and health monitoring with precision and granularity. But the key to harnessing its full potential lies in the optimization of your setup. Let’s ensure you are not just collecting data, but doing it in the most optimal way while gaining actionable insights from it.

The starting point for optimization is a robust setup. Netdata is engineered for minimal footprint and can run on a wide range of hardware—from IoT devices to powerful servers. Time for a deep dive into each of these key areas and what the best practices you should follow, if you are serious about monitoring and optimizing your Netdata monitoring setup:

System Operators: The Role Of SysOps In IT Infrastructure

Fri, 03 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

System operators know the drill: as the complexity of systems scales, so does the deluge of logs. Traditionally, taming this relentless tide demands a concoction of costly tools and laborious configurations—until now. The dynamic duo of systemd-journal and Netdata is revolutionizing log management, turning what was once a Herculean task into a streamlined, powerful, and surprisingly straightforward process.

Efficient Handling of Volume and Velocity

systemd-journal is built to manage the deluge of data that systems generate, without buckling under the speed and volume of incoming logs. It captures logs at the source, facilitating direct and immediate processing. By utilizing the journal’s native mechanism to send logs to a central server, system operators can bypass the complexities of traditional log centralization methods.

Upcoming Changes To Netdata Cloud Plans

Thu, 02 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

UPDATE: On the 2023-11-08 Node and Dashboard limits will be applied on the Netdata Cloud Community plan, while all current features of the Community plan will remain the same.

What you need to know?

On Netdata Cloud Free Community plan, the number of active nodes that can be concurrently visualized on the Netdata dashboards, as well as the number of active custom dashboards for accounts created after 2023-11-07 will be subject to limits.

Netdata vs Prometheus

Sat, 28 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In an era dominated by data-driven decision making, monitoring tools play an indispensable role in ensuring that our systems run efficiently and without interruption. When considering tools like Netdata and Prometheus, performance isn’t just a number; it’s about empowering users with real-time insights and enabling them to act with agility.

There’s a genuine need in the community for tools that are not only comprehensive in their offerings but also swift and scalable. This desire stems from our evolving digital landscape, where the ability to swiftly detect, diagnose, and rectify anomalies has direct implications on user experiences and business outcomes. Especially as infrastructure grows in complexity and scale, there’s an increasing demand for monitoring tools to keep up and provide clear, timely insights.

Discover The New Netdata!

Fri, 27 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Missed the last Netdata updates? Here is what is new:

Explore your systemd-journal logs with Netdata

Netdata got a systemd-journal logs explorer to analyze your systemd-journal logs, directly on their sources. By just installing Netdata on any systemd based system, Netdata automatically finds all the journal sources and presents a powerful dashboard to explore, search, filter and analyze your logs. It works on both individual servers and journal centralization servers.

Improve Your Security With systemd-journal & Netdata

Tue, 24 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

systemd journals play a crucial role in the Linux system ecosystem, and understanding the importance of the logs contained within is essential for both system administrators and developers.

For those unfamiliar, systemd is an init system employed by Linux distributions, initiates the user space and oversees all ensuing processes. One of its key components, systemd journal, assumes a central role in logging system activities and messages, delivering a host of benefits to both system administrators, developers and cyber security engineers. The systemd journal functions as a logging system that gathers, archives, and oversees log messages and event data originating from a diverse array of system components, encompassing the kernel, system services, applications, and user activities.

Monitoring vs Observability: Key Differences

Tue, 24 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

As systems increasingly shift towards distributed architectures to deliver application services, the roles of monitoring and observability have never been more crucial. Monitoring delivers the situational awareness you need to detect issues, while observability goes a step further, offering the analytical depth to understand the root cause of those issues.

Understanding the nuanced differences between monitoring and observability is crucial for anyone responsible for system health and performance. In dissecting these methodologies, we’ll explore their unique strengths, dive into practical applications, and illuminate how to strategically employ each to enhance operational outcomes.

Exploring systemd journal logs with Netdata

Thu, 12 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Today, we released our systemd journal plugin for Netdata, allowing you to explore, view, search, filter and analyze systemd journal logs.

Like most things about Netdata, this is a zero-configuration plugin. You don’t have to do anything apart from installing Netdata on your systems.This is key design direction for Netdata, since we want Netdata to be able to help even if you install it mid-crisis, while you have an incident at hand.

systemd journal logs

Mon, 09 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

“Why bother with it? I let it run in the background and focus on more important DevOps work.” — a random DevOps Engineer at Reddit r/devops

In an era where technology is evolving at breakneck speeds, it’s easy to overlook the tools that are right under our noses. One such underutilized powerhouse is the systemd journal. For many, it’s a mere tool to check the status of systemd service units or to tail the most recent events (journalctl -f). Others who do mainly container work, ignore even its existence.

Netdata Cloud On Prem

Tue, 26 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

We at Netdata understand that infrastructure monitoring can be a complex maze—high costs, specialized skill sets, scalability, data silos, and more. That’s why we have always aimed to streamline and modernize this critical operation. Today, we’re thrilled to announce the launch of Netdata Cloud On Prem, a ground-breaking solution designed for robust on-prem infrastructure monitoring - it comes with all the Netdata Cloud features you love but fully on prem.

Netdata Cloud On-Prem

While Netdata Cloud never stores any of your metric data on the cloud and just streams it ephemerally while you view a chart, the demand for on premise infrastructure monitoring has never been more pressing. Many large enterprises, governmental organizations, research institutes and critical infrastructures require a level of data privacy, security, and customization that only an on-prem solution can offer.

Netdata QoS Classes monitoring

Tue, 26 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Netdata monitors tc QoS classes for all interfaces.

If you also use FireQOS it will collect interface and class names.

There is a shell helper for this (all parsing is done by the plugin in C code - this shell script is just a configuration for the command to run to get tc output).

The source of the tc plugin is here. It is somewhat complex, because a state machine was needed to keep track of all the tc classes, including the pseudo classes tc dynamically creates.

Netdata, Prometheus, Grafana Stack

Tue, 26 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In this blog, we will walk you through the basics of getting Netdata, Prometheus and Grafana all working together and monitoring your application servers. This article will be using docker on your local workstation. We will be working with docker in an ad-hoc way, launching containers that run /bin/bash and attaching a TTY to them. We use docker here in a purely academic fashion and do not condone running Netdata in a container. We pick this method so individuals without cloud accounts or access to VMs can try this out and for it’s speed of deployment.

Process Monitoring vs Console Tools: A Comparison

Tue, 26 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Netdata reads /proc/<pid>/stat for all processes, once per second and extracts utime and stime (user and system cpu utilization), much like all the console tools do.

But it also extracts cutime and cstime that account the user and system time of the exit children of each process. By keeping a map in memory of the whole process tree, it is capable of assigning the right time to every process, taking into account all its exited children.

Our first ML based anomaly alert

Wed, 13 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Over the last few years we have slowly and methodically been building out the ML based capabilities of the Netdata agent, dogfooding and iterating as we go. To date, these features have mostly been somewhat reactive and tools to aid once you are already troubleshooting.

Now we feel we are ready to take a first gentle step into some more proactive use cases, starting with a simple node level anomaly rate alert.

Anomaly Rate By Type

Wed, 30 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

We have recently added a more detailed anomaly rate chart to Netdata that breaks out the overall node anomaly rate by type, this lets you more easily see what parts of your infrastructure might be experiencing an uptick in anomalies when you see the overall node anomaly rate increase.

What is `type`?

type is generally the prefix of the chart id in Netdata and controls where charts live within the menu on the overview page, for example the mem.available chart has a type of mem which in part controls why it lives under the “Memory” section of the menu.

Release 1.41: Brand-New UI For Agents & Parents

Thu, 20 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Netdata Agents and Parents now have a new UI!

Checkout the release meetup video or read on to learn more about the new UI and other features in this release.

Netdata Growth
Release Highlights
Acknowledgements
Contributions
Collectors
Documentation
Packaging/Installation
Health
Exporting
Other Notable Changes
Deprecation notice
- Deprecated in this release
Netdata Release Meetup
Support options

Steady to our schedule, this is another great Netdata release!

Netdata Assistant: Your AI-Powered Troubleshooting Sidekick

Fri, 14 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Hey there! We’re excited to share a new troubleshooting feature we have added to Netdata, the Netdata Assistant. We’ve built this tool to help you troubleshoot more effectively and with less stress. Let’s dive in.

What’s the Netdata Assistant?

The Netdata Assistant is an AI tool that uses large language models and our community’s knowledge to guide you during troubleshooting.

Here’s a scenario. It’s 3 am and you get an alert. Instead of scrambling to Google what’s going on, you can just click on the assistant button. The Netdata Assistant will give you the lowdown on the alert, why it’s happening, and why you should care. It’ll also guide you on how to troubleshoot it and even offer some handy web links for more info, if you’re interested.

Hidden Costs Of Monitoring: Uncovering Expenses & Solutions

Fri, 07 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

When it comes to monitoring IT infrastructure, the costs you see on the price tag of the tool are often just the tip of the iceberg. Below the waterline, a mass of hidden costs can lurk, which can significantly affect the total cost of ownership.

In this blogpost we will cover the analysis of two traditional monitoring domains, Open Source observability and Commercial Centralized observability solutions, focusing the direct and indirect impacts when implementing these solution. In summary:

Netdata & Ansible example: ML demo room

Fri, 07 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

We are always trying to lower the barrier to entry when it comes to monitoring and observability and one place we have consistently witnessed some pain from users is around adopting and approaching configuration management tools and practices as your infrastructure grows and becomes more complex.

To that end, we have begun recently publishing our own little example ansible project used to maintain and manage the servers used in our public Machine Learning Demo room.

Netdata Parents (Streaming and Replication)

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

What are they and why do we need them?

A “Parent” is a Netdata Agent, like the ones we install on all our systems, but is configured as a central node that receives, stores and processes metrics data from other Netdata “Child” nodes in our infrastructure.

Netdata Parents are flexible. You can have one big active-active cluster of Netdata Parents, or you can spread a lot of independent Parents across the infrastructure.

Release 1.40: Summary Tiles, Silencing & ML Tweaks

Wed, 14 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Another release of the Netdata Monitoring solution is here!

Netdata Growth
Release Highlights
- Dashboard Sections’ Summary Tiles
  Added summary tiles to most sections of the fully-automated dashboards, to provide an instant view of the most important metrics for each section.
- Silencing of Cloud Alert Notifications
  Maintenance window coming up? Active issue being checked? Use the Alert notification silencing engine to mute your notifications.
- Machine Learning - Extended Training to 24 Hours
  Netdata now trains multiple models per metric, to learn the behavior of each metric for the last 24 hours. Trained models are persisted on disk and are loaded back on Netdata restart.
- Rewritten SSL Support for the Agent
  Netdata Agent now features a new SSL layer that allows it to reliably use SSL on all its features, including the API and Streaming.
Alerts and Notifications
Visualizations / Charts and Dashboards
Preliminary steps to split native packages
Acknowledgements
Contributions
Deprecation notice
Cloud recommended version
Release meetup
Support options
Running survey

Netdata Growth

🚀 Our community growth is increasing steadily. ❤️ Thank you! Your love and acceptance give us the energy and passion to work harder to simplify and make monitoring easier, more effective and more fun to use.

How Netdata's ML-based Anomaly Detection Works

Tue, 23 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

How does Netdata’s machine learning (ML) based anomaly detection actually work? Read on to find out!

Design considerations

Lets first start with some of the key design considerations and principles of Netdata’s anomaly detection (and some comments in parenthesis along the way):

We don’t have any labels or examples of previous anomalies. This means we are in an unsupervised setting (best we can try to do is learn what “normal” data looks like assuming the collected data is “mostly” normal).
Needs to be lightweight and run on the agent (or a parent).
- Need to be very careful of impact on CPU overhead when training and scoring (lots of cheap models are better than a few expensive and heavy ones).
- Models themselves need to be small so as to not drastically increase the agents memory footprint (model objects need to be small for storage).
- This has implications for the ML formulation (sorry - no deep learning models yet) and its implementation (we need to be surgical and optimized).
Needs to scale for thousands of metrics and score in realtime every second as metrics are collected.
- Typical Netdata nodes have thousands of metrics and we want to be able to score every metric every second with minimal latency overhead (we need to use sensible approaches to training like spreading the training cost over a wide training window).
Needs to be able to handle a wide variety of metrics.
- There is no single perfect model or approach for all types of metrics so we need a good all rounder that can work well enough across any and all different types of time seres metrics (for any given metric of course you could handcraft a better model but thats not feasible here, we need something like a “weak learners” approach of lots of generally useful models adding up to “more than the sum of their parts”).
Needs to be written in C or C++ as that is the language of the Netdata agent (We are using dlib for the current implementation).
We Need to be very careful about taking big or complex dependencies if using third party libraries.
- We want to be able to easily build and deploy Netdata on any Linux system without having to worry about installing or managing complex dependencies (we need to be careful of more complex algorithms that would have larger dependencies and potentially limit where Netdata can run).

The above considerations are important and useful to keep in mind as we explore the system in more detail.

Revolutionizing Ops Centers With Real-Time Monitoring

Fri, 19 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, 24-hour operations centers play a crucial role in managing and monitoring large-scale infrastructures. These centers must be equipped with an effective monitoring solution that addresses their unique needs, enabling them to respond quickly to incidents and maintain optimal system performance. Netdata, a comprehensive monitoring solution, has been designed to meet these critical requirements with its advanced capabilities and recent enhancements.

In this article, we will explore how Netdata’s powerful features can transform the way 24-hour operations centers monitor and manage their complex environments, leading to improved incident detection, faster troubleshooting, and better overall system performance.

The Future Of Infrastructure Monitoring: Scalability & AI

Fri, 19 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In this blog post, we will explore the importance of scalability, automation, and AI in the evolving landscape of infrastructure monitoring. We will examine how Netdata’s innovative solution aligns with these emerging trends, and how it can empower organizations to effectively manage their modern IT infrastructure.

In today’s increasingly complex IT landscape, the need for efficient and reliable infrastructure monitoring has never been more critical. With the proliferation of microservices, distributed systems, and cloud-native applications, managing and monitoring the performance of these rapidly evolving environments has become a significant challenge. As a result, infrastructure monitoring solutions must adapt to keep pace with these changes and deliver the insights necessary to maintain optimal performance.

Monitoring Multi-Cloud & Hybrid-Cloud Infrastructures

Tue, 16 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The advent of multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud architectures has created new opportunities for organizations to leverage best-in-class features from various cloud service providers. However, these complex environments present their own unique challenges, especially when it comes to monitoring and managing performance.

Visibility

The visibility challenge in multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud environments often stems from the use of disparate monitoring tools that are native to each cloud provider. While these native tools (like Amazon CloudWatch, Google Cloud Monitoring, and Azure Monitor) are excellent within their respective ecosystems, they don’t necessarily play well together when it comes to consolidating data and providing a comprehensive, unified view of your entire infrastructure.

Cloud Optimization: Cost, Performance & Resource Strategies

Sun, 14 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Cloud optimization is the ongoing process of analyzing, configuring, and refining cloud environments to improve performance, reduce costs, and align resource usage with business needs. As cloud adoption grows, organizations must move beyond cost-cutting alone and treat optimization as a strategic practice.

Cloud Optimization Strategies To Achieve Business Goals

Cloud optimization strategies generally focus on cost control, performance enhancement, and efficient resource utilization. These strategies range from selecting the right cloud service model (IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS), right-sizing your resources, adopting a multi-cloud approach, automating processes, and investing in robust monitoring tools that can reliably reveal resources utilization and help you ensure that services are tailored to meet business objectives.

Migrating To Cloud: Key Challenges & Best Practices

Sun, 14 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Embarking on a cloud migration journey? Grasp the obstacles and arm yourself with best practices for a smooth transition. Success lies in understanding, planning, and adapting.

As we continue to advance further into the 21st century, businesses of all sizes are finding themselves in the midst of a digital revolution. At the heart of this transformation lies cloud migration, a process that has become a critical strategic decision for organizations aiming to remain competitive, innovative, and responsive to fluctuating market dynamics.

Transform Monitoring With A Machine Learning Approach

Thu, 11 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Unlocking the full potential of monitoring through ML integration, anomaly detection, and innovative scoring engines.

Machine Learning has been making waves in various industries, but its adoption in the monitoring and observability space has been slower than expected. Many “ML” features remain gimmicky and do not provide actual real world value to users that encourages their further use.

At Netdata, we firmly believe that ML is crucial for monitoring, and we’ve taken an ML-first approach to provide users with powerful tools and insights. In this blog post, we’ll discuss the reasons behind our belief in ML, how we’ve integrated ML into our charts and visualizations, our query engines, the scoring engine we’ve built, and how these innovations enable metrics correlations and anomaly advisor.

The Future of Monitoring is Automated and Opinionated

Tue, 09 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

So, you think you monitor your infra?

As humanity increasingly relies on technology, the need for reliable and efficient infrastructure monitoring solutions has never been greater.

However, most businesses don’t take this seriously. They make poor choices that soon trap their best talent, the people who should be propelling them ahead of their competition.

Consider this: most of the world believes that each company needs to dedicate time, talent, and money to configure and set up the monitoring of their web servers and database servers from scratch!

Release 1.39.0: A new era for monitoring charts.

Mon, 08 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Another release of the Netdata Monitoring solution is here!

Netdata open-source growth
Release highlights
- Netdata Charts v3.0 A new era for monitoring charts. Powerful, fast, easy to use. Instantly understand the dataset behind any chart. Slice, dice, filter and pivot the data in any way possible!
- Windows support Windows hosts are now first-class citizens. You can now enjoy out-of-the-box monitoring of over 200 metrics from your Windows systems and the services that run on them.
- Virtual nodes and custom labels You now have access to more monitoring superpowers for managing medium to large infrastructures. With custom labels and virtual hosts, you can easily organize your infrastructure and ensure that troubleshooting is more efficient.
- Major upcoming changes Separate packages for data collection plugins, mandatory zlib, no upgrades of existing installs from versions prior to v1.11.
- Bar charts for functions
- Opsgenie notifications for Business Plan users Business plan users can now seamlessly integrate Netdata with their Atlassian Opsgenie alerting and on call management system.
Data Collection
Alerts and Notifications
- Notifications
- Enhanced Real-Time Alert Synchronization on Netdata Cloud
Visualizations / Charts and Dashboards
- Events Feed
Machine Learning
Installation and Packaging
- Improved Linux compatibility
Administration
- New way to retrieve netdata.conf
Documentation and Demos
Deprecation notice
- Deprecated in this release
Netdata Agent Release Meetup
Support options
Running survey
Acknowledgements

Netdata open-source growth

Over 62,000 GitHub Stars
Over 1.5 million online nodes
Almost 92 million sessions served
Over 600 thousand total nodes in Netdata Cloud

Release highlights

Netdata Charts v3.0

We are excited to announce Netdata Charts v3.0 and the NIDL framework. These are currently available at Netdata Cloud. At the next Netdata release, the agent dashboard will be replaced to also use the same charts.

Infinite Scalability: Monitoring Without Limits

Thu, 04 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Scalability is crucial for monitoring systems as it ensures that they can accommodate growth, maintain performance, provide flexibility, optimize costs, enhance fault tolerance, and support informed decision-making, all of which are critical for effective infrastructure management.

Most monitoring solutions struggle with scalability, mainly because of:

High data volume and velocity: Monitoring systems generate vast amounts of data and as the infrastructure grows, so does the volume and velocity of these data.
Resource constraints: Scalability requires efficient resource utilization, leading to bottlenecks and performance issues as the monitored environment grows.
Architectural limitations: Monitoring systems are usually designed with certain architectural constraints that limit their scalability. Most open source solutions rely on monolithic or centralized architectures that can become overwhelmed at scale.

For open source solutions scalability has always been a challenge, increasing their complexity significantly (check for example the scalability issues of Prometheus), while for commercial solutions it usually results in increased data collection to visualization latency and cost.

Monitoring Disks: Workload, Latency & Saturation

Thu, 04 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Netdata provides a comprehensive set of charts that can help you understand the workload, performance, utilization, saturation, latency, responsiveness, and maintenance activities of your disks. In this blog we will focus on monitoring disks as block devices, not as filesystems or mount points.

The Disks section in the Overview tab contains all the charts that are mentioned in this blog post.

Disk Workload and Performance

Netdata charts for monitoring the workload and the throughput of your disks:

Understanding Huge Pages

Thu, 04 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Memory-intensive applications can benefit from improved performance by using huge pages, as they can reduce TLB pressure and memory fragmentation, and lower the memory management overhead overall. Developers should consider using HugeTLBfs in their mmap() and shmget() calls to take advantage of huge pages.

Transparent Huge Pages (THP) is a Linux kernel feature that provides some of the benefits of huge pages without requiring any development effort. However, THP can cause latency in many applications. Although kernel developers are actively working to address these issues, many system administrators prefer to disable THP altogether.

Unlock the Secrets of Kernel Memory Usage

Thu, 04 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The mem.kernel chart in Netdata provides insight into the memory usage of various kernel subsystems and mechanisms. By understanding these dimensions and their technical details, you can monitor your system’s kernel memory usage and identify potential issues or inefficiencies. Monitoring these dimensions can help you ensure that your system is running efficiently and provide valuable insights into the performance of your kernel and memory subsystem.

Slab

The slab allocator is a memory management mechanism introduced by Jeff Bonwick in 1994 to manage memory allocation for kernel objects. The main purpose of the slab allocator is to reduce memory fragmentation and improve the speed of memory allocation/deallocation. The slab allocator groups objects of the same size into “slabs” and caches the objects to speed up future allocations.

Entropy In Cryptography: Key To Security & Randomness

Wed, 03 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Entropy is a measure of the randomness or unpredictability of data. In the context of cryptography, entropy is used to generate random numbers or keys that are essential for secure communication and encryption. Without a good source of entropy, cryptographic protocols can become vulnerable to attacks that exploit the predictability of the generated keys.

What is Entropy?

In most operating systems, entropy is generated by collecting random events from various sources, such as hardware interrupts, mouse movements, keyboard presses, and disk activity. These events are fed into a pool of entropy, which is then used to generate random numbers when needed.

Context Switching & Its Impact On System Performance