Frequently Asked Questions
How do I sign up for Netdata Pro or Netdata Business?
Please reach out to us and we will add you to the early access waiting list or answer any questions you may have.
Why is Netdata Community Free?
Monitoring and troubleshooting with Netdata is free, forever, for everyone. If you check the feature list carefully, you will see that every single monitoring feature is available for free to everyone.
Also, due to the design of the Netdata solution, all the monitoring capabilities (including ML) are implemented at the Netdata Agent, which is open-source and is installed on-prem.
We only charge for better integration of our monitoring solution with your business processes. We develop both the monitoring solution and the business process integration in parallel, knowing that you will find the Netdata way of monitoring a lot easier, faster, more efficient, more modern, cooler, and eventually you will want to integrate it better with your business processes as your team grows.
Do I have to pay for containers?
No. We don’t charge for containers. You only pay for the number of agents you run concurrently (p90 over time). When netdata runs in a container, it can still monitor all the other containers of the parent host.
Do I have to pay for nodes that are no longer online?
No, you don’t have to pay for offline nodes, even if their data are available to query (we call these “stale” nodes) at a Netdata agent parent. You only pay for the maximum number of concurrently running agents, throughout the month, excluding 10% of the top spikes (p90 over time).
What are committed nodes?
When you subscribe to a Yearly plan, you will need to specify the number of nodes that you will commit to. On these nodes, a discounted price of 25% less than the normal cost per node of the plan is applied. This amount will be part of your annual prepayment.
Node plan discounted price x committed nodes x 12 months
If, for a given month, your usage is over the number of committed nodes, we will charge the original cost per node for the nodes above the committed number.
Note: You will be able to change and adjust these committed nodes at any time. The change will trigger the cancelling of the current plan subscription, where a credit will be applied to the account for the unused period that you can use on future plan subscriptions, and a new one will start for the new adjusted number of committed nodes.
Do I have to pay for the storage my data occupy at Netdata Cloud?
No. We don’t charge for storage.
There’s not a lot of your data at Netdata. It only stores user management, agent management, custom dashboards, alert history, node events and user events related data. When agents are online, we also maintain a summary of the metrics they collect so that the default dashboards can be rendered instantly and a summary of the alert checks they run.
All metrics data collected are maintained by the Netdata Agents you install at your premises. Netdata Agents allow you to build metric data centralization points (Netdata Agent Parents) as needed, and the more you have, the faster Netdata Cloud gets. To present dashboards we query all these Netdata Agents in real-time.
Why do you say that outgoing traffic cost will be negligible?
We don’t centralize metric data at Netdata Cloud. Instead, we transfer just a small amount of metadata to know which metrics each agent collects and maintains and which alerts have been configured. This is just a tiny fraction of the traffic required for transferring metric data.
Of course, we transfer metric data when you view them on a chart. But only when you view them.
Will Netdata overload my servers?
No. Definitely not. For Netdata, overloading a server is a bug that needs to be addressed immediately.
Netdata has been designed to run on every server, container or IoT device and utilize the absolutely minimum of resources (CPU, memory, disk), resources which are usually already available and spare. We have designed it carefully and are always very keen on improving its resource consumption (check the PRs on Github). The Netdata Agent is also open-source, so you can check its code, its progress and the known issues about it.
Compared to other monitoring agents, Netdata is far more efficient in resources utilization.
At the same time, we provide many deployment options so that Netdata can be used for monitoring even the most sensitive or demanding services.
Is there any limit on the number of spaces that can be created by a user?
No. Users can create any number of spaces in any of the plans at the same time. Billing is per space.
For example, a user may have a Business space for work, a Community space for a home lab and a couple of Standalone agents, all at the same time. Or another user may have several Business spaces, one for each of their business partners, and a number of Community spaces for their friends, demos, and more.
Why are you so much cheaper than the competition?
Our goal is to simplify monitoring and at the same time make it more cost-efficient and significantly more effective for troubleshooting and root cause analysis.
Netdata is distributed. It scales to infinity horizontally, and the more distributed it is, the faster it gets. The trick is that metric data and their processing pipelines run at the Netdata agents you install at your premises, utilizing resources that are already available and spare.
Of course, you can have metrics centralization points within your network by configuring one or more Netdata Agents as parents (and we encourage our users to do this), but we don’t centralize the metrics data at Netdata Cloud. Think of Netdata Cloud as a controller of all your Netdata agents. It knows where the data are and is able to query and aggregate responses from multiple agents, to present real-time infrastructure and service level dashboards.
This drastically lowers the cost of processing, storing and querying metric data, while allowing Netdata to be high fidelity monitoring, compared to any other solution. As a result, Netdata is more cost-efficient by design. Most of our cost is about providing convenience to you, as a user of the monitoring solution, by automating the setup process, providing meaningful fully automated dashboards, collecting the best knowledge about health alerts, tuning ML and building awesome AI assisted troubleshooting tools.
Do you need a custom plan tailored to your needs?
Reach out to us and we will work with you to satisfy your specific needs.