NTPdaemon (NTPd) monitoring with Netdata

What is NTPdaemon (NTPd)?

If you think being on time is crucial, and want to get right into the details of monitoring NTPd without wasting any more time. You have come to the right place (and sorry for the time jokes!).

NTPd (Network Time Protocol Daemon) is an open source implementation of the Network Time Protocol (NTP), a protocol for network time synchronization. NTPd is responsible for synchronizing the time of an individual computer to an NTP server. It can also be used to synchronize multiple computers together, as well as synchronize a computer’s time with an external reference clock. NTPd is highly scalable and can be used to synchronize an entire network of computers.

NTPd Provides statistics for the internal variables of the Network Time Protocol daemon ntpd and optional including the configured peers (if enabled in the module configuration). The module presents the performance metrics as shown by ntpq (the standard NTP query program) using NTP mode 6 UDP packets to communicate with the NTP server.

Monitoring NTPd with Netdata

The prerequisites for monitoring NTPd with Netdata are to have NTPd and Netdata installed on your system.

Netdata auto discovers hundreds of services, and for those it doesn’t turning on manual discovery is a one line configuration. For more information on configuring Netdata for NTPdaemon monitoring please read the collector documentation.

You should now see the NTPdaemon section on the Overview tab in Netdata Cloud already populated with charts about all the metrics you care about.

Netdata has a public demo space (no login required) where you can explore different monitoring use-cases and get a feel for Netdata.

What NTPd metrics are important to monitor?

System metrics

Combined offset of the server relative to the host

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Combined system jitter and clock jitter

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Frequency offset relative to the hardware clock

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Clock frequency wander

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Total round-trip delay to the primary refernce clock

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Total root dispersion to the primary reference clock

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Stratum

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Time constant and poll exponent

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Precision

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Peer metrics

If you have NTPd peers configured, Netdata also collects these metrics and the following other peer specific metrics as well.

Peer offset relative to the system clock

Peer RTT delay

Peer Dispersion

Peer Jitter

Peer Xleave

Peer Root Delay

Peer Root Dispersion

Peer Stratum

Peer hmode (Host mode) Peer pmode (Peer mode)

Peer hpoll (Host poll exponent) Peer ppoll (Peer poll exponent)

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