October 23, 2018

2721 words 13 mins read

netdata/netdata

Real-time performance monitoring, done right! https://my-netdata.io/


repo name	netdata/netdata
repo link	https://github.com/netdata/netdata
homepage
language	C
size (curr.)	36197 kB
stars (curr.)	45271
created	2013-06-17
license	GNU General Public License v3.0

Netdata

Netdata is distributed, real-time performance and health monitoring for systems and applications. It is a highly-optimized monitoring agent you install on all your systems and containers.

Netdata provides unparalleled insights, in real-time, of everything happening on the systems it’s running on (including web servers, databases, applications), using highly interactive web dashboards.

A highly-efficient database stores long-term historical metrics for days, weeks, or months, all at 1-second granularity. Run this long-term storage autonomously, or integrate Netdata with your existing monitoring toolchains (Prometheus, Graphite, OpenTSDB, Kafka, Grafana, and more).

Netdata is fast and efficient, designed to permanently run on all systems (physical and virtual servers, containers, IoT devices), without disrupting their core function.

Netdata is free, open-source software and it currently runs on Linux, FreeBSD, and MacOS, along with other systems derived from them, such as Kubernetes and Docker.

Netdata is not hosted by the CNCF but is the 3rd most starred open-source project in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) landscape.

People get addicted to Netdata. Once you use it on your systems, there is no going back! You’ve been warned…

What does it look like? - Take a quick tour through the dashboard
Our userbase - Enterprises we help monitor and our userbase
Quickstart - How to try it now on your systems
Why Netdata - Why people love Netdata and how it compares with other solutions
News - The latest news about Netdata
How Netdata works - A high-level diagram of how Netdata works
Infographic - Everything about Netdata in a single graphic
Features - How you’ll use Netdata on your systems
Visualization - Learn about visual anomaly detection
What Netdata monitors - See which apps/services Netdata auto-detects
Documentation - Read the documentation
Community - Discuss Netdata with others and get support
License - Check Netdata’s licencing
Is it any good? - Yes.
Is it awesome? - Yes.

What does it look like?

The following animated GIF shows the top part of a typical Netdata dashboard.

The Netdata dashboard inaction

A typical Netdata dashboard, in 1:1 timing. Charts can be panned by dragging them, zoomed in/out with SHIFT + mouse wheel, an area can be selected for zoom-in with SHIFT + mouse selection. Netdata is highly interactive, real-time, and optimized to get the work done!

Want to see Netdata live? Check out any of our live demos.

User base

Netdata is used by hundreds of thousands of users all over the world. Check our GitHub watchers list. You will find people working for Amazon, Atos, Baidu, Cisco Systems, Citrix, Deutsche Telekom, DigitalOcean, Elastic, EPAM Systems, Ericsson, Google, Groupon, Hortonworks, HP, Huawei, IBM, Microsoft, NewRelic, Nvidia, Red Hat, SAP, Selectel, TicketMaster, Vimeo, and many more!

Docker pulls

We provide Docker images for the most common architectures. These are statistics reported by Docker Hub:

Registry

When you install multiple Netdata, they are integrated into one distributed application, via a Netdata registry. This is a web browser feature and it allows us to count the number of unique users and unique Netdata servers installed. The following information comes from the global public Netdata registry we run:

In the last 24 hours:

Quickstart

To install Netdata from source on any Linux system (physical, virtual, container, IoT, edge) and keep it up to date with our nightly releases automatically, run the following:

# make sure you run `bash` for your shell
bash

# install Netdata directly from GitHub source
bash <(curl -Ss https://my-netdata.io/kickstart.sh)

Starting with v1.12, Netdata collects anonymous usage information by default and sends it to Google Analytics. Read about the information collected, and learn how to-opt, on our anonymous statistics page.

The usage statistics are vital for us, as we use them to discover bugs and prioritize new features. We thank you for actively contributing to Netdata’s future.

To learn more about the pros and cons of using nightly vs. stable releases, see our notice about the two options.

The above command will:

Install any required packages on your system (it will ask you to confirm before doing so)
Compile it, install it, and start it.

More installation methods and additional options can be found at the installation page.

To try Netdata in a Docker container, run this:

docker run -d --name=netdata \
  -p 19999:19999 \
  -v /etc/passwd:/host/etc/passwd:ro \
  -v /etc/group:/host/etc/group:ro \
  -v /proc:/host/proc:ro \
  -v /sys:/host/sys:ro \
  -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro \
  --cap-add SYS_PTRACE \
  --security-opt apparmor=unconfined \
  netdata/netdata

For more information about running Netdata in Docker, check the docker installation page.

From Netdata v1.12 and above, anonymous usage information is collected by default and sent to Google Analytics. To read more about the information collected and how to opt-out, check the anonymous statistics page.

Why Netdata

Netdata has a quite different approach to monitoring.

Netdata is a monitoring agent you install on all your systems. It is:

A metrics collector for system and application metrics (including web servers, databases, containers, and much more),
A long-term metrics database that stores recent metrics in memory and “spills” historical metrics to disk for efficient long-term storage,
A super fast, interactive, and modern metrics visualizer optimized for anomaly detection,
And an alarms notification engine for detecting performance and availability issues.

All the above, are packaged together in a very flexible, extremely modular, distributed application.

This is how Netdata compares to other monitoring solutions:

Netdata	others (open-source and commercial)
High resolution metrics (1s granularity)	Low resolution metrics (10s granularity at best)
Monitors everything, thousands of metrics per node	Monitor just a few metrics
UI is super fast, optimized for anomaly detection	UI is good for just an abstract view
Long-term, autonomous storage at one-second granularity	Centralized metrics in an expensive data lake at 10s granularity
Meaningful presentation, to help you understand the metrics	You have to know the metrics before you start
Install and get results immediately	Long preparation is required to get any useful results
Use it for troubleshooting performance problems	Use them to get statistics of past performance
Kills the console for tracing performance issues	The console is always required for troubleshooting
Requires zero dedicated resources	Require large dedicated resources

Netdata is open-source, free, super fast, very easy, completely open, extremely efficient, flexible and integrate-able.

It has been designed by system administrators, DevOps engineers, and developers for to not just visualize metrics, but also troubleshoot complex performance problems.

News

Nov 27th, 2019 - Netdata v1.19.0 released!

Release v1.19.0 contains 2 new collectors, 19 bug fixes, 17 improvements, and 19 documentation updates.

We completed a major rewrite of our web log collector to dramatically improve its flexibility and performance. The new collector, written entirely in Go, can parse and chart logs from Nginx and Apache servers, and combines numerous improvements. Netdata now supports the LTSV log format, creates charts for TLS and cipher usage, and is amazingly fast. In a test using SSD storage, the collector parsed the logs for 200,000 requests in about 200ms, using 30% of a single core.

This Go-based collector also has powerful custom log parsing capabilities, which means we’re one step closer to a generic application log parser for Netdata. We’re continuing to work on this parser to support more application log formatting in the future.

We have a new tutorial on enabling the Go web log collector and using it with Nginx and/or Apache access logs with minimal configuration. Thanks to Wing924 for starting the Go rewrite!

We introduced more cmocka unit testing to Netdata. In this release, we’re testing how Netdata’s internal web server processes HTTP requests—the first step to improve the quality of code throughout, reduce bugs, and make refactoring easier. We wanted to validate the web server’s behavior but needed to build a layer of parametric testing on top of the CMocka test runner. Read all about our process of testing and selecting cmocka on our blog post: Building an agile team’s ‘safety harness’ with cmocka and FOSS.

Netdata’s Unbound collector was also completely rewritten in Go to improve how it collects and displays metrics. This new version can get dozens of metrics, including details on queries, cache, uptime, and even show per-thread metrics. See our tutorial on enabling the new collector via Netdata’s amazing auto-detection feature.

We fixed an error where invalid spikes appeared on certain charts by improving the incremental counter reset/wraparound detection algorithm.

Netdata can now send health alarm notifications to IRC channels thanks to Strykar!

And, Netdata can now monitor AM2320 sensors, thanks to hard work from Tom Buck.

See more news and previous releases at our blog or our releases page.

How it works

Netdata is a highly efficient, highly modular, metrics management engine. Its lockless design makes it ideal for concurrent operations on the metrics.

This is how it works:

Function	Description	Documentation
Collect	Multiple independent data collection workers are collecting metrics from their sources using the optimal protocol for each application and push the metrics to the database. Each data collection worker has lockless write access to the metrics it collects.	`collectors`
Store	Metrics are first stored in RAM in a custom database engine that then “spills” historical metrics to disk for efficient long-term metrics storage.	`database`
Check	A lockless independent watchdog is evaluating health checks on the collected metrics, triggers alarms, maintains a health transaction log and dispatches alarm notifications.	`health`
Stream	A lockless independent worker is streaming metrics, in full detail and in real-time, to remote Netdata servers, as soon as they are collected.	`streaming`
Archive	A lockless independent worker is down-sampling the metrics and pushes them to backend time-series databases.	`backends`
Query	Multiple independent workers are attached to the internal web server, servicing API requests, including data queries.	`web/api`

The result is a highly efficient, low-latency system, supporting multiple readers and one writer on each metric.

Infographic

This is a high level overview of Netdata feature set and architecture. Click it to to interact with it (it has direct links to our documentation).

Features

finger-video

This is what you should expect from Netdata:

General

1s granularity - The highest possible resolution for all metrics.
Unlimited metrics - Netdata collects all the available metrics—the more, the better.
1% CPU utilization of a single core - It’s unbelievably optimized.
A few MB of RAM - The highly-efficient database engine stores per-second metrics in RAM and then “spills” historical metrics to disk long-term storage.
Minimal disk I/O - While running, Netdata only writes historical metrics and reads error and access logs.
Zero configuration - Netdata auto-detects everything, and can collect up to 10,000 metrics per server out of the box.
Zero maintenance - You just run it. Netdata does the rest.
Zero dependencies - Netdata runs a custom web server for its static web files and its web API (though its plugins may require additional libraries, depending on the applications monitored).
Scales to infinity - You can install it on all your servers, containers, VMs, and IoT devices. Metrics are not centralized by default, so there is no limit.
Several operating modes - Autonomous host monitoring (the default), headless data collector, forwarding proxy, store and forward proxy, central multi-host monitoring, in all possible configurations. Each node may have different metrics retention policies and run with or without health monitoring.

Health Monitoring & Alarms

Sophisticated alerting - Netdata comes with hundreds of alarms out of the box! It supports dynamic thresholds, hysteresis, alarm templates, multiple role-based notification methods, and more.
Notifications: alerta.io, amazon sns, discordapp.com, email, flock.com, hangouts, irc, kavenegar.com, messagebird.com, pagerduty.com, prowl, pushbullet.com, pushover.net, rocket.chat, slack.com, smstools3, syslog, telegram.org, twilio.com, web and custom notifications.

Integrations

Time-series databases - Netdata can archive its metrics to Graphite, OpenTSDB, Prometheus, AWS Kinesis, MongoDB, JSON document DBs, in the same or lower resolution (lower: to prevent it from congesting these servers due to the amount of data collected). Netdata also supports Prometheus remote write API, which allows storing metrics to Elasticsearch, Gnocchi, InfluxDB, Kafka, PostgreSQL/TimescaleDB, Splunk, VictoriaMetrics and a lot of other storage providers.

Visualization

Stunning interactive dashboards - Our dashboard is mouse-, touchpad-, and touch-screen friendly in 2 themes: slate (dark) and white.
Amazingly fast visualization - Even on low-end hardware, the dashboard responds to all queries in less than 1 ms per metric.
Visual anomaly detection - Our UI/UX emphasizes the relationships between charts so you can better detect anomalies visually.
Embeddable - Charts can be embedded on your web pages, wikis and blogs. You can even use Atlassian’s Confluence as a monitoring dashboard.
Customizable - You can build custom dashboards using simple HTML. No JavaScript needed!

Positive and negative values

To improve clarity on charts, Netdata dashboards present positive values for metrics representing read, input, inbound, received and negative values for metrics representing write, output, outbound, sent.

positive-and-negative-values

Netdata charts showing the bandwidth and packets of a network interface. received is positive and sent is negative.

Autoscaled y-axis

Netdata charts automatically zoom vertically, to visualize the variation of each metric within the visible time-frame.

non-zero-based

A zero-based stacked chart, automatically switches to an auto-scaled area chart when a single dimension is selected.

Charts are synchronized

Charts on Netdata dashboards are synchronized to each other. There is no master chart. Any chart can be panned or zoomed at any time, and all other charts will follow.

charts-are-synchronized

Charts are panned by dragging them with the mouse. Charts can be zoomed in/out withSHIFT + mouse wheel while the mouse pointer is over a chart.

The visible time-frame (pan and zoom) is propagated from Netdata server to Netdata server when navigating via the My nodes menu.

Highlighted time-frame

To improve visual anomaly detection across charts, the user can highlight a time-frame (by pressing Alt + mouse selection) on all charts.

highlighted-timeframe

A highlighted time-frame can be given by pressing Alt + mouse selection on any chart. Netdata will highlight the same range on all charts.

Highlighted ranges are propagated from Netdata server to Netdata server, when navigating via the My nodes menu.

What Netdata monitors

Netdata can collect metrics from 200+ popular services and applications, on top of dozens of system-related metrics jocs, such as CPU, memory, disks, filesystems, networking, and more. We call these collectors, and they’re managed by plugins, which support a variety of programming languages, including Go and Python.

Popular collectors include Nginx, Apache, MySQL, statsd, cgroups (containers, Docker, Kubernetes, LXC, and more), Traefik, web server access.log files, and much more.

See the full list of supported collectors.

Netdata’s data collection is extensible, which means you can monitor anything you can get a metric for. You can even write a collector for your custom application using our plugin API.

Documentation

The Netdata documentation is at https://docs.netdata.cloud, but you can also find each page inside of Netdata’s repository itself in Markdown (.md) files. You can find all our documentation by navigating the repository.

Here is a quick list of notable documents:

Directory	Description
`installer`	Instructions to install Netdata on your systems.
`docker`	Instructions to install Netdata using docker.
`daemon`	Information about the Netdata daemon and its configuration.
`collectors`	Information about data collection plugins.
`health`	How Netdata’s health monitoring works, how to create your own alarms and how to configure alarm notification methods.
`streaming`	How to build hierarchies of Netdata servers, by streaming metrics between them.
`backends`	Long term archiving of metrics to industry-standard time-series databases, like `prometheus`, `graphite`, `opentsdb`.
`web/api`	Learn how to query the Netdata API and the queries it supports.
`web/api/badges`	Learn how to generate badges (SVG images) from live data.
`web/gui/custom`	Learn how to create custom Netdata dashboards.
`web/gui/confluence`	Learn how to create Netdata dashboards on Atlassian’s Confluence.

You can also check all the other directories. Most of them have plenty of documentation.

Community

We welcome contributions. Feel free to join the team!

To report bugs or get help, use GitHub’s issues.

You can also find Netdata on:

License

Netdata is GPLv3+.

Netdata re-distributes other open-source tools and libraries. Please check the third party licenses.

Is it any good?

Yes.

When people first hear about a new product, they frequently ask if it is any good. A Hacker News user remarked:

Note to self: Starting immediately, all raganwald projects will have a “Is it any good?” section in the readme, and the answer shall be “yes.".

So, we follow the tradition…

Is it awesome?

These people seem to like it.

c monitoring