Tiered Retention on Netdata

Distributed Observability For Scale, Speed & Control

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

Collect unlimited metrics at per-second granularity with zero configuration. Netdata’s edge-native architecture eliminates cardinality cost traps while delivering ML-based anomaly detection on every metric.

Netdata Parents For Intelligent Observability

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

Streaming aggregators that centralize data from thousands of nodes while keeping intelligence distributed at the edge. Handle million metrics per second with minimal resources, active-active clustering for high availability, and ML-powered insights without centralized bottlenecks.

Tiered Retention With 0.6 Bytes/Sample Storage

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

Netdata redefines tiered retention through edge-native architecture that updates all storage tiers simultaneously during collection, eliminating batch jobs and maintenance overhead while providing 15× better efficiency than traditional systems.

Metric Cardinality In Observability: Strategies

Sun, 10 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It’s a story familiar to any SRE or DevOps engineer. You add a seemingly innocuous label to a key metric—user_id, request_id, container_id—to gain deeper insight. Suddenly, your monitoring bill skyrockets, your Prometheus_TSDB instance starts gasping for memory, and dashboards slow to a crawl. You have just triggered a label_explosion, the single biggest challenge in modern metrics-based observability: metrics_cardinality.

High cardinality isn’t an edge case; it’s the new normal in a world of microservices, containers, and complex user interactions. As the number of unique time series grows into the millions or even billions, it places immense pressure on monitoring systems, impacting storage_costs, query performance, and the fundamental ability to scale.

Netdata vs Prometheus: A 2025 Performance Analysis

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

When it comes to infrastructure monitoring, performance, scalability, and efficiency are critical considerations. In this blog post, we revisit two widely adopted open-source monitoring solutions: Netdata and Prometheus. Both tools have introduced notable improvements in their latest versions, emphasizing scalability and enhanced efficiency.

In our previous analysis, we explored key differences between these systems, focusing on resource consumption and data retention. This follow-up expands on that comparison by subjecting both tools to a significantly larger workload. With the number of monitored nodes increased to 1000, containers to 80k, and metrics ingestion reaching 4.6 million metrics per second, we examine how each system performs under these demanding conditions, focusing on CPU utilization, memory requirements, disk I/O, network usage, and data retention during data ingestion.

Long-Term Data Storage and Retention in Netdata

Tue, 21 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Netdata’s database engine (dbengine) provides a sophisticated multi-tiered storage system designed for efficient long-term data retention while maintaining high granularity. This article explores the technical details of how Netdata handles metric storage, the advantages of its distributed architecture, and how to configure it for your specific needs.

Database Engine Architecture

Netdata’s database engine provides a sophisticated, efficient solution for long-term metric storage through:

Intelligent multi-tiered storage architecture
Efficient compression and caching mechanisms
Flexible retention strategies
Distributed deployment options

This design enables organizations to maintain detailed historical data while optimizing storage use and maintaining query performance.

Netdata Best Practices

Fri, 03 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Effective system monitoring is non-negotiable in today’s complex IT environments. Netdata offers real-time performance and health monitoring with precision and granularity. But the key to harnessing its full potential lies in the optimization of your setup. Let’s ensure you are not just collecting data, but doing it in the most optimal way while gaining actionable insights from it.

The starting point for optimization is a robust setup. Netdata is engineered for minimal footprint and can run on a wide range of hardware—from IoT devices to powerful servers. Time for a deep dive into each of these key areas and what the best practices you should follow, if you are serious about monitoring and optimizing your Netdata monitoring setup:

Netdata vs Prometheus

Sat, 28 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In an era dominated by data-driven decision making, monitoring tools play an indispensable role in ensuring that our systems run efficiently and without interruption. When considering tools like Netdata and Prometheus, performance isn’t just a number; it’s about empowering users with real-time insights and enabling them to act with agility.

There’s a genuine need in the community for tools that are not only comprehensive in their offerings but also swift and scalable. This desire stems from our evolving digital landscape, where the ability to swiftly detect, diagnose, and rectify anomalies has direct implications on user experiences and business outcomes. Especially as infrastructure grows in complexity and scale, there’s an increasing demand for monitoring tools to keep up and provide clear, timely insights.

Netdata Parents (Streaming and Replication)

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

What are they and why do we need them?

A “Parent” is a Netdata Agent, like the ones we install on all our systems, but is configured as a central node that receives, stores and processes metrics data from other Netdata “Child” nodes in our infrastructure.

Netdata Parents are flexible. You can have one big active-active cluster of Netdata Parents, or you can spread a lot of independent Parents across the infrastructure.

Infinite Scalability: Monitoring Without Limits

Thu, 04 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Scalability is crucial for monitoring systems as it ensures that they can accommodate growth, maintain performance, provide flexibility, optimize costs, enhance fault tolerance, and support informed decision-making, all of which are critical for effective infrastructure management.

Most monitoring solutions struggle with scalability, mainly because of:

High data volume and velocity: Monitoring systems generate vast amounts of data and as the infrastructure grows, so does the volume and velocity of these data.
Resource constraints: Scalability requires efficient resource utilization, leading to bottlenecks and performance issues as the monitored environment grows.
Architectural limitations: Monitoring systems are usually designed with certain architectural constraints that limit their scalability. Most open source solutions rely on monolithic or centralized architectures that can become overwhelmed at scale.

For open source solutions scalability has always been a challenge, increasing their complexity significantly (check for example the scalability issues of Prometheus), while for commercial solutions it usually results in increased data collection to visualization latency and cost.

Release 1.37: Infinite Scalability & Database Tiering

Wed, 30 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Another release of the Netdata Monitoring solution is here!

We focused on these key areas:

Infinite scalability of the Netdata Ecosystem

Default Database Tiering, offering months of data retention for typical Netdata Agent installations with default settings and years of data retention for dedicated Netdata Parents.

Overview Dashboards at Netdata Cloud got a ton of improvements to allow slicing and dicing of data directly on the UI and overcome the limitations of the web technology when thousands of charts are presented on one page.

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.

Data Collection Strategies For Infrastructure

Tue, 06 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Monitoring and troubleshooting; unfortunately, these terms are still used interchangeably, which can lead to misunderstandings about data collection strategies.

In this article we aim to clarify some important definitions, processes, and common data collection strategies for monitoring solutions. We will specify the limitations of the described strategies, as well as key benefits which can potentially be also used for troubleshooting needs.

IT infrastructure monitoring is a business process of collecting and analyzing data over a period of time to improve business results.

How and why we’re bringing long-term storage to Netdata

Wed, 07 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve built a lot of amazing things into the open-source Netdata monitoring system. But, no matter how far we’ve come, we’ll always be proud of how little RAM it uses.

Right now, Netdata stores metrics in your system’s RAM using a ridiculously efficient database. It only saves or loads historical metrics from disk when you restart it. With this system, Netdata can be both low-resource and exhaustive in its collection of real-time metrics.