Observability on Netdata

Native macOS Monitoring: Logs, Sensors, GPU & Hardware Health

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve overhauled macOS monitoring in the latest Netdata release. Netdata already collects system metrics on Macs at per-second resolution; this release completes the picture with logs and hardware telemetry, areas that previously required users to run CLI tools like log show and powermetrics. The new collectors read this data through Apple’s own frameworks, allowing users to trace application and OS errors and catch hardware issues early.

Fleet Observability: Linux Edge Device Monitoring

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It feels less like managing devices and more like remote babysitting. You check the dashboard, everything is green, and then a customer in the field tells you a device has been down for two days. At a handful of servers, the rare failure is an event. Across thousands of distributed Linux endpoints — robots in warehouses, EV chargers across a city, kiosks in retail, IoT gateways in the field — the rare failure becomes a daily occurrence, and the tools built for a datacenter quietly stop telling you the truth.

Robot Fleet Monitoring with Per-Second Edge Intelligence

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Netdata runs on each robot, collecting per-second metrics for compute, memory, storage, thermals, and network — keeping thousands of devices observable even on intermittent site networks, without centralized SaaS.

Real Time Network Monitoring: Topology, NetFlow, SNMP

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Interface counters tell you a port is busy. Bytes in, bytes out, errors, drops. That’s enough to know a link is saturated, but not enough to know which conversations are saturating it, which devices are involved, or how a problem propagates across your network. For that you’ve traditionally needed dedicated network performance monitoring tools, usually expensive, usually a separate console from the rest of your monitoring.

Today we’re closing that gap. Netdata has had solid network interface monitoring for a long time through its native collectors and SNMP support. We’ve now built out the rest of the picture, and it adds up to NPM-class network monitoring: live network topology, NetFlow and sFlow traffic analysis, SNMP device monitoring across 200+ vendor profiles, SNMP trap handling, and a dedicated network monitoring dashboard. All of it runs alongside the infrastructure, application, and container metrics Netdata already collects, on the same timeline, in the same platform.

Grafana vs Datadog: The honest comparison in 2026

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

High Cardinality Metrics At Scale: A Better Playbook

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The “high cardinality is expensive” sentence has become observability’s version of “in this economy”: said so often that nobody questions whether it’s true. Every vendor pricing page invokes it. Every glossary article repeats it. Every architecture diagram shows aggregation buffers placed before the storage layer.

“High cardinality is expensive” is not a fact about the universe; it’s a fact about one architectural choice: centralizing time-series storage and querying it through an index that scales with unique series. Once you accept that choice, everything follows. You pay per metric, you drop labels you wish you’d kept, you pre-aggregate before storage, and you discover that the bug you were debugging only existed at the full resolution you already threw away.

The best AI-powered observability platforms in 2026

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The best DevOps monitoring tools in 2026

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Best Infrastructure Monitoring Tools In 2026

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The best open-source observability tools in 2026

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Netdata Skills: Teach Your AI Coding Agent To Monitor

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a growing ecosystem of AI coding agents: Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, Codex, Gemini CLI, Windsurf, and others. They’re good at writing code, but they don’t inherently know how to instrument that code for observability, configure monitoring infrastructure, or troubleshoot production systems using real telemetry data. That knowledge lives in documentation, runbooks, and the heads of your senior SREs.

We’ve open-sourced a repository that encodes this knowledge into a format AI agents can use directly. netdata/skills is a collection of agent skills, published in the open agentskills.io format, that teach AI coding agents how to set up Netdata, instrument applications with OpenTelemetry, build collector pipelines, troubleshoot 49 specific technologies, and verify everything against live data via MCP.

OpenTelemetry and Netdata, Today

Fri, 15 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

OpenTelemetry has become the default way to instrument applications and ship telemetry. The hard part has never been the data model. It’s been picking a backend that handles OTLP without quietly turning into a per-metric bill or a black box that swallows your data.

Netdata is a native OTLP backend. Stand up an OpenTelemetry Collector with any of its hundreds of receivers, point its OTLP exporter at Netdata, and you get per-second charts, ML anomaly detection on every signal, AI-assisted troubleshooting, and infrastructure correlation, with no per-metric, per-series, or per-host charges. Metrics and logs work today. Trace support is coming soon.

Dashboard Playlists: Cycle Through Dashboards in TV Mode

Tue, 12 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When we shipped TV mode, we heard almost immediately: “Great, but I have five dashboards and one screen.” A single dashboard on a wall display covers one view of your infrastructure. If you want to rotate between your network overview, database health, application metrics, and infrastructure summary, someone has to walk over and click, or you’re buying more screens.

Dashboard playlists solve this. You can now select a sequence of dashboards to cycle through in TV mode, with a configurable rotation interval. Set it up once, open the TV mode URL on your display, and the screen rotates through your chosen dashboards on its own.

Azure Local Migration: Monitor Both Sides In One View

Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

More organizations are moving workloads from Azure public cloud to Azure Local (formerly Azure Stack HCI) than most people realize. The reasons vary: data sovereignty requirements, latency-sensitive workloads that need to be closer to the edge, cost optimization for predictable workloads where reserved cloud capacity doesn’t make financial sense, or regulatory constraints that require data to stay on-premises.

Geo Maps: See Where Your Infrastructure Lives

Sat, 09 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When your infrastructure is spread across regions, data centers, branch offices, or edge locations, knowing where a node is physically located matters more than people usually admit. During an incident, “the node in the Singapore POP” communicates faster than a hostname. When you’re planning capacity, seeing geographic clustering tells you something that a flat list of nodes doesn’t. When a subset of your fleet starts misbehaving, the first question is often “is this regional?”

NVIDIA DCGM Collector: Deep GPU Monitoring For AI

Mon, 04 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

GPU infrastructure is expensive and increasingly central to production workloads. Whether you’re running ML training jobs, inference serving, video transcoding, or HPC workloads, understanding what your GPUs are actually doing, and what’s going wrong when performance degrades, is not optional. The problem is that NVIDIA’s Data Center GPU Manager (DCGM) exposes an enormous amount of telemetry, but getting that data into a monitoring system in a useful, organized way has traditionally required significant setup and custom dashboarding work.

Misconfigured Alert Detection: Tuning Made Easy

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Netdata ships with hundreds of stock alerts. They cover a wide range of infrastructure conditions and they’re designed with sensible defaults. But “sensible defaults” and “correct for your environment” are not the same thing. A CPU threshold that’s perfectly reasonable for a build server might generate constant noise on a machine running batch jobs. An alert that’s critical for production might be irrelevant in staging, where it fires daily and everyone ignores it.

Azure Monitor Collector: Monitor Azure Infrastructure

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re running infrastructure on Azure, you’ve probably dealt with the split between your Azure-native monitoring and the rest of your stack. Your VMs, databases, and Kubernetes clusters generate platform metrics through Azure Monitor, but those metrics live in a separate world from the OS-level, application, and on-prem metrics you’re already watching in Netdata. You end up checking two (or more) places during incidents, building mental bridges between dashboards that don’t talk to each other.

Database Performance Monitoring: 14+ DBs Supported

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Netdata has always collected database metrics: connections, throughput, replication lag, buffer cache hit ratios, and so on. These tell you that something is wrong, but they don’t tell you why. When your PostgreSQL response time spikes, the metric alone doesn’t tell you which query is responsible. For that, you’ve traditionally needed to SSH into the box, connect to the database, and run diagnostic queries manually. Or set up a separate database monitoring tool entirely.

Nagios Plugins: Run Existing Checks & Custom Scripts

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A lot of teams have a collection of Nagios plugins and custom monitoring scripts that have been running reliably for years. Some are standard community plugins for checking disk health or SSL certificate expiry. Others are homegrown Bash or Python scripts that check something very specific to the business: whether an API endpoint returns the right payload, whether a batch job completed on time, whether a queue depth is within bounds. These scripts work, they’re battle-tested, and nobody wants to rewrite them.

Smarter Alerts: Test, Review & Preview Schedules

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Alert fatigue usually isn’t caused by one thing. It’s the accumulation of thresholds that are slightly too sensitive, alerts that fire during known maintenance windows, and historical patterns that nobody has the tools to review easily. Fixing it requires better visibility into how alerts actually behave over time, and a way to test changes before they hit production.

We’ve shipped three improvements to alerting in Netdata that address different parts of this problem: the ability to evaluate alert definitions against historical data before deploying them, a timeline view of alert transitions, and a schedule preview for recurring silencing rules.

TV Mode: Put Your Dashboards on the Big Screen

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

One of the most common requests we’ve gotten since launching custom dashboards is deceptively simple: “How do I put this on a TV?” Teams want their dashboards on wall-mounted screens in NOCs, war rooms, and open office spaces. The dashboard is already built. The data is already there. They just need a way to display it on a screen that nobody is logged into, without exposing the full Netdata Cloud interface.

New Custom Dashboards: Metrics, Logs & Live Commands

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Custom dashboards in Netdata have always let you pull charts together on-the-fly into a single view. That’s useful, but it’s also limited. In practice, when you’re running an incident or reviewing a service, you don’t just want charts. You want to see the output of top alongside your CPU metrics. You want slow query logs next to your database latency charts. You want an infrastructure summary card that tells you how many nodes in a room are healthy without having to click through to find out.

Alert Acknowledgement: Mark It as Seen, Keep Working

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you’ve ever opened the alerts tab during a busy period, you know the problem. There are alerts you’ve already looked at, alerts someone on your team is handling, and alerts that fired on a known issue that’s being worked on. They all sit together in the same list alongside the new ones you haven’t seen yet. There’s no way to say “I’ve seen this, move on” without silencing or disabling the alert entirely, which is a much heavier action than the situation calls for.

Expanded Chart View: Investigate Without Leaving the Chart

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Charts in Netdata have always been interactive. You can zoom, pan, select time ranges, and see per-second granularity across thousands of metrics. But when you spotted something interesting, the next steps usually meant leaving the chart: opening another tab to check a related metric, navigating to the correlation tool, or pulling up a different time range for comparison. The investigation workflow lived outside the chart, even though the chart was where the investigation started.

Conversations: Ask Netdata About Anything You're Looking At

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Netdata AI can already troubleshoot your alerts and generate Insights reports. What it couldn’t do, until now, was have a back-and-forth conversation. You could get a one-shot analysis, but you couldn’t ask follow-up questions, pull in additional context, or go from a quick question to a full investigation without starting over.

We’ve added a conversational layer to Netdata AI. You’ll notice a new blue chat icon throughout Netdata Cloud, on charts, in the alerts table, on Insights reports, and in the reports list. Click it, and you’re in a conversation where the thing you clicked on is already the context. No copy-pasting metric names, no explaining what you’re looking at.

Node Groups: Organize Infrastructure Into Views

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When you’re managing a handful of nodes, the flat list in the nodes tab works fine. When you’re managing hundreds or thousands, it becomes a wall of hostnames. You end up applying the same filters repeatedly: all the production database servers, all the nodes in eu-west, all the Kubernetes workers in the staging cluster. The filters work, but they don’t persist, and there’s no way to share them with the rest of your team.

Introducing the Netdata Cloud MCP Server

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Netdata Cloud MCP Server is now available — giving AI agents and assistants direct access to your Netdata through a single endpoint at app.netdata.cloud/api/v1/mcp.

AI Is Changing How We Monitor Infrastructure

If you’re an engineer in 2026, chances are AI is already part of your daily workflow, whether that’s a general-purpose assistant like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini that you bounce questions off, or a coding agent like Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or Windsurf that writes and debugs code alongside you. These tools are incredibly powerful, but until now, they’ve been blind to what’s actually happening on your infrastructure.

Howard Conference & Expo 2026: Smarter Observability

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Netdata team will be at the Howard Conference and Expo “Game On” event, February 24-26, 2026 at the Grand Hotel Marriott Resort in Fairhope, Alabama. We’re looking forward to meeting IT leaders and practitioners to talk about real-time observability—what it actually looks like in practice, and where traditional monitoring falls short.

What We’ll Be Showing

Stop by our booth to see Netdata in action and chat with our team about what you’re dealing with in your own environment.

India DevOps Show 2026: Modern Observability Recap

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

DevOps has fundamentally transformed how organizations build and deliver software. But as deployment velocity increases and infrastructure becomes more dynamic, the gap between shipping code and truly understanding system behavior continues to widen. Teams need observability that keeps pace with their pipelines, not tools that slow them down or break the budget.

Netdata is proud to participate as a Silver Partner at the 10th Edition India DevOps Show 2026, taking place on February 13, 2026 at Aloft ORR Hotel, Bengaluru. We’re excited to engage with India’s vibrant DevOps community and share our vision for efficient, intelligent observability.

Tech Show London 2026: Cloud & AI Observability Recap

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The intersection of cloud and AI is creating unprecedented infrastructure complexity. As organizations race to deploy AI workloads alongside traditional cloud services, the demand for intelligent, high-fidelity observability has never been greater. Understanding what’s happening across your entire stack, in real time, is no longer a luxury, it’s a necessity.

That’s why the Netdata team is excited to be part of Tech Show London 2025, taking place March 4-5 at ExCeL London. We’ll be in the Cloud & AI Infrastructure zone, ready to show you how modern observability should work.

Database Monitoring Software Without Query Languages

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Netdata gives DBAs complete database visibility with per-second query performance, replication lag tracking, lock analysis, and connection pool monitoring across MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Oracle, and MongoDB - all from one dashboard with zero configuration.

Netdata vs ScienceLogic | Monitoring Tools Comparison

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Comprehensive comparison of Netdata and ScienceLogic Skylar One platforms, highlighting real-time per-second visibility, transparent pricing, and zero-configuration deployment advantages over enterprise-focused 5-minute polling.

Introducing Real-Time Conversations with Netdata AI

Tue, 23 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Over the past few months, we’ve seen incredible adoption of our AI Investigations and Insights reports. Teams are using them to automate the deep, thoughtful analysis required for complex post-mortems, capacity planning, and performance optimization. These comprehensive reports are fantastic when you need a well-researched, shareable document.

But what about the moments during an investigation? What about the rapid-fire “what if” questions and the quick exploration of hypotheses that happen in the heat of the moment? For that, you need speed and interactivity. You need a partner you can have a real-time dialogue with.

Cloud Monitoring Software With Real-Time Metrics & AI