Welcome to netdata!
A live demo of netdata is available at netdata.firehol.org.
Want to set it up on your systems now? Jump to Installation.
Netdata is a daemon 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.
It has been designed to be installed on every system, without disrupting the applications running on it:
It will just use some spare CPU cycles (check Performance).
It will use the memory you want it have (check Memory Requirements).
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!
So, netdata is: non disruptive, real-time performance monitoring and visualization, in the greatest possible detail.
How it works
You run a daemon on your linux: netdata. This daemon is written in C and is extremely lightweight.
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.
Can I code too?
Of course! Fork the repo, adapt as you see fit and create pull requests. If you want to discuss your plans, open a github issue to start the discussion.
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...
Is there a roadmap?
Well, we plan to do these:
Allow the default dashboard to connect to multiple netdata servers:
add connect to connect to more netdata servers
add search to find charts and dimensions on all connected servers
add compare to create a dynamic dashboard using charts from all connected servers
Allow custom dashboards to be defined using JSON files, to avoid writing HTML. These JSON dashboards should also include any user documentation needed.
We are already pretty close for this. The default dashboard is abstracted enough to support it. It still needs some work though.
Allow creating dashboards from other dashboards (so that complex dashboards can be created).
Improve the memory database (possibly using the internal deduper, compression, disk archiving, mirroring it to third party databases, etc).
Create more plugins. A lot more plugins.
Allow internal plugins to be forked to external processes (this will protect the netdata daemon from plugin crashes, allow different security schemas for each plugin, etc).
Document everything (this is a work in progress already).
A live demo of netdata is available at netdata.firehol.org.
Want to set it up on your systems now? Jump to Installation.
Netdata is a daemon 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.
It has been designed to be installed on every system, without disrupting the applications running on it:
It will just use some spare CPU cycles (check Performance).
It will use the memory you want it have (check Memory Requirements).
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!
So, netdata is: non disruptive, real-time performance monitoring and visualization, in the greatest possible detail.
How it works
You run a daemon on your linux: netdata. This daemon is written in C and is extremely lightweight.
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.
Can I code too?
Of course! Fork the repo, adapt as you see fit and create pull requests. If you want to discuss your plans, open a github issue to start the discussion.
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...
Is there a roadmap?
Well, we plan to do these:
Allow the default dashboard to connect to multiple netdata servers:
add connect to connect to more netdata servers
add search to find charts and dimensions on all connected servers
add compare to create a dynamic dashboard using charts from all connected servers
Allow custom dashboards to be defined using JSON files, to avoid writing HTML. These JSON dashboards should also include any user documentation needed.
We are already pretty close for this. The default dashboard is abstracted enough to support it. It still needs some work though.
Allow creating dashboards from other dashboards (so that complex dashboards can be created).
Improve the memory database (possibly using the internal deduper, compression, disk archiving, mirroring it to third party databases, etc).
Create more plugins. A lot more plugins.
Allow internal plugins to be forked to external processes (this will protect the netdata daemon from plugin crashes, allow different security schemas for each plugin, etc).
Document everything (this is a work in progress already).
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