Engineering on Netdata

Join Us

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

Build infrastructure observability at massive scale with Netdata. Remote-first culture, open source core, 76K+ GitHub stars. Own the full stack, ship code used by millions, work with world-class engineers.

Our Values and Promises

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

Discover the 12 principles that guide every decision at Netdata. From radical transparency to edge-native intelligence, learn how we invest engineering effort to eliminate complexity and align our success with your operational needs.

Upcoming Changes to Plugins in Native Packages

Wed, 15 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

At Netdata, we’re committed to trying to make Netdata work as well as possible for our users. Sometimes though, that means changing things in ways that aren’t exactly seamless. Such a change is coming soon for users of our native DEB and RPM packages, and this blog post will explain what’s happening, why we’re doing it, and what it means for our users.

What’s changing?

Starting shortly after the v1.39.0 release of the Netdata Agent, we will be splitting most of our external data collection plugins out to their own individual packages instead of bundling them all in the main netdata package. We already have this type of split for our CUPS and FreeIPMI plugins, and this new change will extend that to also provide separate packages for the following plugins:

The Netdata Way of Troubleshooting

Mon, 04 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Together with you, our fabulous community, Netdata is changing the way the world thinks of high fidelity monitoring - and we are gaining momentum.

Our chief troublemaker and CEO, Costa Tsaousis, is the pioneer and architect of this revolution that’s brewing in the monitoring and troubleshooting space.

Watch him explain the Netdata way of troubleshooting:

Why did the world need a new infrastructure monitoring tool? (00:18)

Every great hero needs an origin story. In this section, Costa explains the frustrating conditions in the infrastructure and monitoring space that lead to the conception, development, and subsequent success of the Netdata open-source Agent and Netdata Cloud.

All-new Netdata Cloud Charts 2.0

Tue, 30 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Netdata excels in collecting, storing, and organizing metrics in out-of-the-box dashboards for powerful troubleshooting. We are now doubling down on this by transforming data into even more effective visualizations, helping you make the most sense out of all your metrics for increased observability.

The new Netdata Charts provide a ton of useful information and we invite you to further explore our new charts from a design and development perspective. As always, it’s our goal to be as open and transparent as possible with our users on all things Netdata, including the ins and outs of how Netdata is built, why we make certain design decisions (driven by you of course!), and where we are heading as we continue to grow.

How to extend the Geth collector

Mon, 13 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This is the the last of a 2-part blog post series regarding Netdata and Geth. If you missed the first, be sure to check it out here.

Geth is short for Go-Ethereum and is the official implementation of the Ethereum Client in Go. Currently it’s one of the most widely used implementations and a core piece of infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem.

With this proof of concept I wanted to showcase how easy it really is to gather data from any Prometheus endpoint and visualize them in Netdata. This has the added benefit of leveraging all the other features of Netdata, namely it’s per-second data collection, automatic deployment and configuration and superb system monitoring.

How to monitor the Geth node in under 5 minutes

Mon, 13 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This piece is a blog post version of a workshop I gave at EthCC about monitoring an Ethereum Node using Netdata.

Disclaimer: Although we use Netdata, this guide is generic. We talk about metrics that can be surfaced by many other tools, such as Prometheus/Grafana or Datadog.

The contents are as follows:

Introduction to Ethereum Nodes
What is Netdata
How to monitor a system that runs go-ethereum (Geth)
How to monitor go-ethereum (Geth)

Ethereum Nodes

Running a node is no small feat, as it requires increasingly more and more resources to store the state of the blockchain and quickly process new transactions.

Root cause analysis using Metric Correlations

Fri, 03 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

As complexity of systems and applications continue to evolve and change, the number of metrics that need to be monitored grows in parallel. Whether you’re on a DevOps team, an SRE, or a developer building the code yourself, many of these components may be fragmented across your infrastructure, making it increasingly difficult to identify the root cause when experiencing downtime or abnormal behavior. To help solve this challenge, we built the Metric Correlations feature – an automated analysis tool that evaluates all your metrics to identify which have changed the most within a given period of interest.

How To Monitor Disks & Filesystems With eBPF

Mon, 16 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction to eBPF

Current IT monitoring software lacks the necessary metrics for minimizing downtime for systems and applications. Most provide system and application metrics but there is much more than this required for properly monitoring your infrastructure. With eBPF there is a technological advancement that allows monitoring software to provide rich information from the Linux kernel and present it. eBPF monitoring, specifically, provides a better understanding of what exactly is occurring on internal systems, which helps to identify where performance improvements can be made.

Container deployment showdown: Docker or Kubernetes?

Wed, 24 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Monitoring the current state and performance of applications is critical for IT Ops and DevOps teams alike. Understanding the health of an application is one of the most effective ways of anticipating potential bottlenecks or slowdowns, yet it’s one of the largest challenges faced by many organizations that build and deploy software. This is largely due to applications’ distributed and diversified nature. A single outage has the potential to interrupt entire processes that, at times, can interfere with business as a whole and result in a negative effect on the bottom line.

5 DevOps best practices to reinforce with monitoring tools

Thu, 18 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

As part of a modern software development team, you’re asked to do a lot. You’re supposed to build faster, release more frequently, crush bugs, and integrate testing suites along the way. You’re supposed to implement and practice a strong DevOps culture, read entire novels about SRE best practices, go agile, or add a bunch of Scrum ceremonies to everyone’s calendar. Every week, the industry recommends that you “shift-left” another part of the DevOps pipeline, to the point where you’re supposed to handle everything from unit testing to production deployment optimization from day one.

Introduction to StatsD

Wed, 03 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

StatsD is an industry-standard technology stack for monitoring applications and instrumenting any piece of software to deliver custom metrics. The StatsD architecture is based on delivering the metrics via UDP packets from any application to a central statsD server. Although the original StatsD server was written in Node.js, there are many implementations today, with Netdata being one of them.

StatsD makes it easier for you to instrument your applications, delivering value around three main pillars: open-source, control, and modularity. That’s a real windfall for full-stack developers who need to code quickly, troubleshoot application issues on the fly, and often don’t have the necessary background knowledge to use complex monitoring platforms.

Actionable Alerts With Fewer False Positives

Thu, 21 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Think about any sport or competitive activity, whether that’s football or a spelling bee. They always feature at least one person who acts as a moderator, referee, or judge. With their domain expertise, this person watches everyone’s behavior and constantly compares that against a set of rules. If someone crosses that threshold, they blow a whistle or throw up a flag. They are, in effect, saying that things have gone from OK to not OK.

Four key metrics for responding to IT incidents and failures

Thu, 07 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re a veteran in this space, you probably understand the many incident response metrics and concepts, along with the many (at times exasperating) acronyms. For those new to the space, or even those with years of experience, the terminology is often overwhelming.

If you’re one of those people who’s struggling to navigate through the world of DevOps metrics, we’ve created this article for you. In this post, we’ll cover four main incident response metrics: MTTA, MTTR, MTBF, and MTTF. Learn what these acronyms mean, how you can use them, and how you can tie these KPIs into your Netdata experience.

What is DevOps?

Thu, 19 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In software development, it’s important to have a team dedicated to ensuring all systems and applications maintain maximum performance and uptime. Establishing processes that limit system and application slowdowns and outages while expediting the product release process is often done through a developer operations team, also known as dev ops or DevOps.

DevOps teams are responsible for improving communication and collaboration across engineering teams to increase an organization’s ability to efficiently deliver products and services that serve the end-user. In this post, we’ll describe the different elements of DevOps, including what DevOps is, how it works, and how Netdata helps DevOps teams succeed.

The reality of Netdata’s long-term metrics storage database

Mon, 12 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The perception that Netdata is only capable of short-term metrics storage is a myth. It’s a pervasive myth we still see in blog posts and through community engagement, despite it being false for more than a year.

However, like all myths, this one on metrics storage began with a kernel of truth. When Netdata first flourished as an open-source project in 2017 and 2018, the default metrics database was RAM-only. You could configure this database’s size, but for many users, that size was limited by the amount of RAM they were willing to allocate for metrics storage. We also kept the default value low to ensure Netdata worked efficiently on all hardware and a variety of operating systems.

Software Extensibility Is Key To Adoption

Fri, 25 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

As with most commercial products, software today is mass produced for reasons of simple economics. But making the same software work for as many people as possible while also meeting the unique requirements different people and organizations have is a challenging task.

The strategies used today to provide extensibility at cost and at the level required by various enterprises are very similar to the ones used in the 80s and 90s, when PCs first took off and captured an enormous amount of the home computing market, and when open source software started gaining popularity.

Metric Correlations: Detect Patterns & Anomalies

Wed, 16 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Today, we are excited to launch our first Netdata Cloud Insights feature, Metric Correlations, developed for discovering underlying issues more quickly and identifying the root cause more efficiently. Read on to learn more about our approach to developing this new feature, how it works, and the many benefits you’ll find incorporating this into your team’s troubleshooting workflow.

Some background

Let’s start with a bit of a disclaimer. It seems machine learning (ML) (or “Artificial Intelligence,” if you are looking for more LinkedIn likes) has gone mainstream in the last few years, and we are probably by now somewhere near the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” on the hype cycle. It is in this context that we want to be clear about what our goals are in this space and our approach to releasing data-driven features that draw on techniques from statistics and ML. In short, we want to be clear, open, realistic, and avoid buzzwords at all costs!

Over the next 12 months, we are hoping to begin building a layer of intelligence¹ throughout Netdata (both Cloud and Agent) to assist with “human in the loop” troubleshooting, mainly to help users more easily surface slowdowns, anomalies, or other issues and lower your cognitive load² as you troubleshoot using Netdata. Simply put, we’re working to streamline your mean time to resolution (MTTR).

The Netdata Community Powered by NodeBB

Thu, 13 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We recently adopted NodeBB as our software of choice for building the Netdata Community. We have many good reasons for why we wanted to provide our community with a proper home online, but I wanted to cover some of the technical reasons for choosing NodeBB for our platform, and the many parallels between the NodeBB and Netdata projects, which was certainly a driving force behind this decision.

Why Netdata picked VerneMQ

Tue, 14 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In 2019, the Netdata team already knew that a Netdata Cloud solution in the form of an online platform would greatly complement Netdata’s distributed monitoring by making it much easier to organize large infrastructures and by enabling new ways for teams to collaborate. The old node registry available at the time wasn’t enough for Netdata’s users.

Building an online platform, even one that does not directly process users’ metrics, is challenging. But less challenging than it was even a few years ago, since the technology stack has improved greatly over the years.

What is Infrastructure Monitoring?

Tue, 30 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

IT is advancing blazingly fast. To keep up with architectural changes and hybrid environments, it’s more important than ever to maintain efficient infrastructure monitoring and troubleshooting. Adding to the complexity is the increase of distributed systems, comprised of many components and services. For IT teams to effectively manage monitoring modern infrastructure, it’s necessary to have the right practices and tools in place that enable teams to do their jobs as quickly as possible with fewer resources.

The role of shift-left testing in an agile environment

Tue, 14 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

With the rapid growth of security threats to infrastructure, it’s more important than ever to proactively address vulnerabilities. As an open-source project, built on the trust of users and contributors, Netdata has security concerns at its core.

Because we’re committed to code security and quality, we apply Agile principles throughout the software development process. A component of this includes regular static analysis. Through continuous, automated testing, we’re able to move quickly to keep up with end-user requests without compromising our source code.

Agile Team Safety Harness With cmocka & FOSS

Tue, 26 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Netdata is made up from agile teams who are deeply committed to improving the usability of our product. We want to respond to our users and introduce in-demand features. Working directly with our community is the best way to make Netdata better.

But we face the same the dilemma as all agile teams: How do we do this safely?

Safety means that we can move quickly without compromising the quality of our code. Because we want to move quickly, engage with our users’ desires, and keep quality high, we’re becoming very serious about adopting unit testing in our work.