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.
Node groups solve this. You can now save any set of filters or manually selected nodes as a named group, and that group becomes a tab in your nodes view. Create a group called “Production Databases” or “US-East Edge Nodes” or “GPU Cluster,” and it’s one click away every time you come back.
How it works
Creating a group starts from the nodes tab. Apply your filters, select your nodes, or combine both, then save the result as a named node group. It shows up as a new tab alongside your existing views. You can create as many groups as you need, reorder the tabs to match your priorities, and hide ones that aren’t relevant to your current work.
Groups are dynamic when built from filters. If you create a group based on a filter like “all nodes with the label env:production,” new nodes that match that filter will appear in the group automatically. If you build a group from a manual selection, it stays fixed to those specific nodes.
You can update groups over time as your infrastructure changes. Rename them, adjust the filters, add or remove nodes. The tabs are yours to organize however makes sense for your team.
Why this matters for larger environments
The practical impact scales with the size of your infrastructure. If you have 50 nodes, this is a nice convenience. If you have 500 or 5,000, it changes how you navigate Netdata entirely. Instead of starting every session by filtering down to the slice of infrastructure you care about, you click a tab and you’re there.
It also makes handoffs easier. When the whole team shares the same set of named groups, everyone is working from the same mental model of how the infrastructure is organized. “Check the US-East Edge Nodes group” is a lot more useful in a Slack message than “filter by region us-east and label type:edge in the nodes tab.”
This feature is available now for all users on a Business plan or free trial.