Costa Tsaousis opened the final day of the Open Source Monitoring Conference (OSMC) 2024 in Nuremberg on November 21, speaking from 9:30 to 10:00 at the Jacobi venue. His talk, “Netdata: Open Source, Distributed Observability Pipeline – Journey and Challenge,” covered the project’s evolution and the architectural decisions that set it apart from other open-source monitoring tools.
OSMC runs November 19–21 and is one of the more established events in the European IT monitoring space. The attendees are people who run Icinga, Checkmk, Prometheus, Zabbix, and similar tools in production. They know monitoring. What they wanted to hear was how Netdata’s distributed approach – agents collecting and processing data at the edge, with no mandatory centralized storage – compares to the centralized architectures they are used to.
Costa walked through the trade-offs: what you gain in latency and data fidelity by processing at the edge, and what you lose in terms of centralized querying and long-term storage. For an audience that manages monitoring infrastructure as part of their job, the architectural details mattered more than the feature list.
