How-To on Netdata

Introducing the Netdata demo space

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Introducing Netdata’s Demo Space, a quick and easy way to experience monitoring environments before you set them up yourself.

At Netdata, we are always striving to provide the best monitoring experience for our users. We understand that adopting a new monitoring solution can sometimes be challenging, especially when you’re unsure of how it will fit your specific environment. That’s why we’re excited to announce the Netdata Demo Space!

Monitor & Troubleshoot ISP Performance With Netdata

Mon, 28 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Find out how to monitor your Internet speed and quality and how well your ISP is performing.

What Factors Affect My Internet Speed?

Several factors can influence your internet speed, ranging from your ISP’s infrastructure to your home setup. Here’s a breakdown:

1. ISP Plan & Bandwidth

The speed you experience depends on the plan you choose from your ISP. Higher-tier plans offer more bandwidth, which means faster speeds for downloading, streaming, and gaming.

How to monitor node reboots?

Thu, 17 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Monitoring the health and status of nodes and servers is a critical part of effective infrastructure monitoring.

How to monitor node reboots?

One of the most critical tasks of monitoring an infrastructure is to check the health of its servers/nodes. In most cases, this results in setting up a “Hardware manager” from the hardware vendor delivering these servers or setting up an SNMP (or similar) agent to continuously monitor the availability of the server and report when there is a reboot / failure.

Monitor indoor air quality with Airthings and Netdata

Wed, 02 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Monitoring indoor air quality with Airthings and Netdata. Understanding and measuring common contaminants and pollutants reduces your risk of air quality health concerns.

Indoor air quality and what to monitor

Indoor air quality can be a crucial influence on your health, wellbeing and productivity.

Understanding and measuring common contaminants and pollutants is the first step towards reducing your risk of air quality health concerns.

Airthings is a company that makes great air quality sensors that measure a wide variety of different variables including:

Monitoring & troubleshooting Cassandra with Netdata

Sat, 29 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

How to monitor and troubleshoot Cassandra with Netdata.

Note: This post is the second part of a Cassandra monitoring series. Be sure to read our first entry here.

Monitoring Cassandra with Netdata

Netdata’s Cassandra collector documentation explains how to set it up to collect metrics automatically.

Once you have followed the instructions in the docs and have installed and configured Netdata on the Cassandra cluster you are ready to start monitoring and troubleshooting. Check out the Cassandra demo room to interact with the charts, metrics and other functionality described here.

How to monitor and fix Database bloats in PostgreSQL?

Fri, 28 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Database bloat is disk space that was used by a table or index and is available for reuse by the database but has not been reclaimed. Bloat is created when deleting or updating tables and indexes. Here’s how to deal with it!

What is Database bloat?

Database bloat is disk space that was used by a table or index and is available for reuse by the database but has not been reclaimed. Bloat is created when deleting or updating tables and indexes.

Cassandra Monitoring: Key Metrics & Best Practices

Thu, 27 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

What are the important Cassandra metrics to monitor and how to monitor them.

What Is Cassandra & Why Use It

Cassandra is an open-source, distributed, wide-column NoSQL database management system written in Java. Cassandra was originally developed by Avinash Lakshmanan and Prashant Malik at Facebook and then released as open source, eventually becoming part of the Apache project.

Cassandra is a NoSQL database - NoSQL (also known as “not only SQL”) databases do not require data to be stored in tabular format. They provide flexible schemas and scale easily with large amounts of data and high user loads.

How to find out which application is causing server load

Wed, 26 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We often hear the term load used to describe the state of a server or a device, but we’re here to tell you what it means, precisely, and how to monitor it.

What is server load?

We often hear the term “load” used to describe the state of a server or a device. But what does it really mean?

System load is a measure of the amount of computational work that a system performs. An overloaded system, by definition, isn’t able to complete all its tasks per schedule - this affects the performance and productivity of the system. And while “load” often gets conflated with CPU usage there’s a lot more to it.

How to monitor the disk usage on your infrastructure

Tue, 25 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The most important part of disk usage monitoring is to check the utilization of each filesystem and each mount point which can reveal existing or impending issues with the storage space on your infrastructure.

What Does Disk Usage (DU) Mean?

Disk usage (DU) refers to the portion or percentage of computer storage that is currently in use. It contrasts with disk space or capacity, which is the total amount of space that a given disk is capable of storing. Disk usage is a crucial metric to any computing system, as it gives the user the information needed not only for storage, but also software requirements and overall operation. Although it usually refers to a computer’s hard disk, it may also refer to external storage, such as a USB drive or compact disc (CD).

7 types of Redis latency and how to fix it

Mon, 24 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Redis is designed to be fast. In most cases, it is. However, there are times when Redis may be slow, due to network issues, disk latency, or other factors. When this happens, it is important to be able to detect the slow down and investigate the cause of Redis latency.

Redis & latency

Latency is the maximum delay between the time a client issues a command and the time the reply to the command is received by the client. Redis has strict requirements on average and worst case latency.

How to monitor systemd service liveness

Fri, 21 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The life of a sysadmin or SRE is often difficult, but occasionally very simple things can make a huge difference. Basic monitoring of your systemd services is one of those simple things, which we sometimes overlook. The simplest question one would want to know is if the thing that’s supposed to be running is actually running at all. If you use systemd services, you can guarantee an answer to that question within minutes using Netdata.

Web Servers Monitoring: Key Metrics & Strategies

Thu, 20 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The Importance Of Monitoring Web Servers

Web servers are among the most important components in modern IT infrastructures. They host the websites, web services, and web applications that we use on a daily basis. Social networking, media streaming, software as a service (SaaS), and other activities wouldn’t be possible without the use of web servers. And with the advent of cloud computing and the movement of more services online, web servers and their monitoring are only becoming more important. Given the extensive usage of Web servers, Sysadmins and SREs should monitor web servers as a key aspect for performance.

How to monitor HTTP endpoints

Mon, 17 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The HTTP protocol has become the de facto standard application layer protocol of the internet. From publicly available web sites and APIs to “inter-process” communications in REST based microservice architectures or large Service Oriented Architectures based on SOAP, you find HTTP being used again and again, due to its simplicity and our familiarity with it. How many protocols can you name that have memes for their status codes? Of course, such a popular protocol has endless pages written about how to properly monitor the services that rely on it, with many options specific to every use case. What you will learn here is how to get your basics done in monitoring HTTP endpoints, so you can be up and running in a few minutes, monitoring all HTTP services in your entire infrastructure.

How to monitor DNS query response time

Wed, 12 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

DNS (Domain Name System) servers translate standard language web addresses to their actual IP addresses for network access.

DNS Lookup Journey

DNS response time is the time it takes a Domain Name Server to receive the request for a domain name’s IP address, process it, and return the IP address to the browser or application requesting it. When it comes to DNS response times, the lower the better, and generally values less than 100ms are considered to be in the acceptable range (depending on the application).

Why is data replication important?

Wed, 12 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

High availability. This is what every monitoring tool needs to ensure that you never compromise on IT infrastructure visibility. On top of high availability, do you really want to enable all available features on your production system? It is important for the monitoring tool to have a low footprint on your CPU consumption and memory usage. Let’s dive deeper into the recommended way of configuring Netdata to ensure high availability and a low resource footprint through data replication.

How to monitor host reachability

Mon, 10 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Most sysadmins and developers have at some point used a few of the popular Linux networking commands or their Windows equivalents to answer the common questions of host reachability - that is, whether a host or service is reachable and how fast it responds.

Common approaches to reachability

One of the simplest, common checks, is to simply ping a host to verify that it’s reachable from where you issue the command, and to see the total time it takes for the host to receive your request.

How to filter metrics by label?

Thu, 06 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

It is sometimes easy to get lost in the mountain of metrics and infinite number of dimensions when working with an infrastructure monitoring tool. Being able to filter metrics by label and visualize only what is relevant to the current scope of monitoring &troubleshooting, becomes absolutely crucial to the success of SREs, Sysadmins and DevOps professionals.

The Netdata chart label filtering feature supports grouping by and filtering each chart based on labels (key/value pairs) applicable to the context and provides fine-grain capability on slicing the data / metrics.

Missing indexes in PostgreSQL? How to quickly identify it

Wed, 05 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

While working on improving the Netdata PostgreSQL collector, we were monitoring our production PostgreSQL instance and something caught our attention immediately. The rows fetched ratio seemed really, really low for one particular database… there were missing indexes in PostgreSQL!

Rows fetched ratio is the percentage of rows that contain data needed to execute the query (rows fetched), out of the total number of rows scanned (rows returned). A low value indicates that the database is performing extra work by scanning a large number of rows that aren’t required to process the query.