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Costa Tsaousis edited this page Sep 28, 2016 · 176 revisions

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Welcome to netdata!

User Base Monitored Servers Sessions Served
(the figures come from netdata registry data, showing only installations that use the public global registry, counting since May 16th 2016)

New Users Today New Machines Today Sessions Today
Check Generating Badges for more information.

latest news

netdata at the state of github octoverse 2016

There have been significant improvements to alarms in netdata since release 1.3.0. Alarms and notifications now support hysteresis, dynamic thresholds, self cancellation, they are clickable to lead you to the chart that raised the alarm, they can be sent as mobile phone push notifications (pushover.net), web browser push notifications, slack notifications, telegram.org notifications, they support roles with multiple recipients and filtering based on severity per recipient. New alarms have been added and the thresholds and severities of all alarms have been improved to avoid unnecessary notifications.

These are the key changes since the last release of netdata:

demo sites

Live demo installations of netdata are available at http://netdata.rocks:

Location netdata demo URL 60 mins reqs VM Donated by
London (UK) london.netdata.rocks
(this is the global netdata registry and has named and mysql charts)
Requests Per Second DigitalOcean.com
Atlanta (USA) atlanta.netdata.rocks
(with named and mysql charts)
Requests Per Second CDN77.com
Bangalore (India) bangalore.netdata.rocks Requests Per Second DigitalOcean.com
Frankfurt (Germany) frankfurt.netdata.rocks Requests Per Second DigitalOcean.com
New York (USA) newyork.netdata.rocks Requests Per Second DigitalOcean.com
San Francisco (USA) sanfrancisco.netdata.rocks Requests Per Second DigitalOcean.com
Singapore singapore.netdata.rocks Requests Per Second DigitalOcean.com
Toronto (Canada) toronto.netdata.rocks Requests Per Second DigitalOcean.com

Netdata dashboards are mobile and touch friendly.

Installation

Want to set it up on your systems now? Jump to Installation.


What is it?

Netdata is a real-time performance and health monitoring solution.

Unlike other solutions that are only capable of presenting statistics of past performance, netdata is designed to be perfect for real-time performance troubleshooting.

Netdata is a linux daemon you run, that collects data in realtime (per second) and presents a web site to view and analyze them. The presentation is also real-time and full of interactive charts that precisely render all collected values.

Netdata has been designed to be installed on every system, without disrupting the applications running on it:

  1. It will just use some spare CPU cycles (check Performance).
  2. It will use the memory you want it have (check Memory Requirements).
  3. Once started and while running, it does not use any disk I/O, apart its logging (check Log Files). Of course it saves its DB to disk when it exits and loads it back when it starts.

You can use it to monitor all your systems and applications. It will run on Linux PCs, servers or embedded devices.

Out of the box, it comes with plugins that collect key system metrics and metrics of popular applications.


Why another monitoring tool?

The key goal of netdata is to help you achieve operational excellence.

To achieve that, it focuses on real-time visualization of what is happening on your systems or applications now and in the recent past.

netdata tries to visualize the truth of now, in its greatest detail, with detail comparable to the console tools!


How it works?

You run a daemon on your linux: netdata. This daemon is written in C and is extremely lightweight. With less than 1% CPU utilization of a single core (for the netdata core, plugins may use more), you get hundreds of charts and thousands of metrics, all collected and visualized per second.

netdata:

  • Spawns threads to collect all the data from all sources - it uses Internal Plugins and External Plugins for this.
  • Keeps track of the collected values in memory (no disk I/O at all, check Memory Requirements).
  • Is a standalone web server that serves its static files, for rendering its dashboards.
  • It provides a REST API v1 for your browser to access the data.

If you install it on all your systems, each netdata will be standalone. There is no central netdata. Your web browser is the only entity that can connect all the netdata installations together. netdata dashboards can have charts from multiple netdata installations and these charts will still behave, on your browser, as if they were coming from the same netdata server!

In this image you can see netdata displaying charts from 2 servers. On the left is the demo site and on the right is a local installation of it (you have the same page on your netdata too, at /tv.html):

tv


Documentation

This wiki is the whole of it. Other than the wiki, currently there is the... source code.

You should at least walk through the pages of the wiki. They have a good overview of netdata, what it can do and how to use it.


Support

If you need help, please use the github issues section.


FAQ

Is it ready?

Software is never ready. There is always something to improve.

Netdata is stable. We use it on production systems without any issues.

Is it released?

Yeap! Check the releases page.

Why you wrote data collection?

Well, there are plenty of data collectors already. But we have one or more of the following problems with them:

  • They are not able for per second data collection
  • They can do per second data collection, but they are not optimized enough for always running on all systems
  • They need to be configured, when we need auto-detection

Of course, we could use them just to get data at a slower rate, and this can be done, but it was not our priority. netdata proves that real-time data collection and visualization can be done efficiently.

Is it practical to have so short historical data?

For a few purposes yes, for others no.

Our focus is real-time data collection and visualization. Our (let's say) "competitors" are the console tools, neither grafana nor collectd, statsd, nagios, zabbix, etc. All these are perfect tools for what they do (and they do a lot). But we think they provide "statistics about past performance" (of course with alarms, health monitoring, etc). netdata provides "real-time performance monitoring", much like the console tools do. Different things.

Of course, historical data is our next priority.

Why there is no "central" netdata?

We strongly believe monitoring should be scaled out, not up. A "central" monitoring server is just another problem and should be avoided. Of course it is needed for health monitoring, but for real-time performance monitoring it will just add delays and eventually destroy the whole idea.

We all have a wonderful tool on our desktops, that connects us to the entire world: the web browser! This is the "central" netdata that connects all the netdata installations. We have done a lot of work towards this and we believe we are very close to show you what we mean. Patience...

Can I help?

Of course! Please do!

As with all open source projects, the more people using it, the better the project is. So give it a github star, post about it on facebook, twitter, reddit, google+, hacker news, etc. Spreading the word costs you nothing and helps the project improve. It is the minimum you should give back for using a project that has thousands of hours of work in it and you get it for free.

Also important is to open github issues for the things that are not working well for you. This will help us make netdata better.

These are others areas we need help:

  • Can you code?

    • you can write plugins for data collection. This is very easy and any language can be used.
    • you can write dashboards, specially optimised for monitoring the applications you use.
  • Can you write documentation?

    • We have left the wiki open for anyone to edit. If any area needs further details, you can edit that page. (of course we monitor all edits - so please try to contribute and not destroy things).
  • Do you have special skills?

    • are you a marketing guy? Help us setup a social media strategy to build and grow the netdata community.
    • are you a devops guy? Help us setup and maintain the public global servers.
    • are you a linux packaging guy? Help us distribute pre-compiled packages of netdata for all major distributions, or help netdata be included in official distributions.

Is there a roadmap?

These are what we currently work on (in that order):

  1. Finish packaging for the various distros.

  2. Add health monitoring (alarms, notifications, etc)

  3. More plugins - a lot more plugins!

  • monitor more applications (hadoop and friends, postgres, etc)
  • rewrite the netfilter plugin to use libnlm.
  • allow internal plugins to be forked to external processes (this will protect the netdata daemon from plugin crashes, allow different security schemes for each plugin, etc).
  1. Improve the memory database (possibly using an internal deduper, compression, disk archiving, mirroring it to third party databases, etc).

  2. Invent a flexible UI to connect multiple netdata server together. We have done a lot of progress with the registry and the my-netdata menu, but still there are a lot more to do.

  3. Document everything (this is a work in progress already).

There are a lot more enhancements requested from our users (just navigate through the issues to get an idea). Enhancements like authentication on UI, alarms and alerts, etc will fit somehow into this list. Patience...

General


Running Netdata


Alarms


Netdata Registry


Monitoring Info


Netdata Badges


Data Collection

Binary Modules

Python Modules

Node.js Modules

BASH Modules


API Documentation


Web Dashboards


Running behind another web server

Advanced configurations


Donations


Blog


Other monitoring tools

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