Netdata is a seriously impressive server monitoring tool(thenewstack.io)
thenewstack.io
Netdata is a seriously impressive server monitoring tool
https://thenewstack.io/netdata-is-a-seriously-impressive-server-monitoring-tool-to-keep-you-up-to-date-on-insights/
3 comments
Totally agree. I was quite impressed with UI and bling bling when one of our employees installed it to monitor one of our servers (university team of 15 people) .However it turned out to be a total cognitive overload and very hard to bring it down to the strictly necessary to maintain the server. Then the cloud login stuff was a show stopper. We moved from nagios via icinga to checkmk, but we are still quite unhappy with good metrics based monitoring (we had munin at some point). A lot of the solutions seems overkill or oversimplify alarm states leading to a lot of false positives or duplicate notifications.
I used to love netdata, but right around dashboard v3 I switched to Prometheus+grafana
I still miss the no-fuss configuration and the anomaly detection was well done, but I just can't do the required cloud thing it does now
I still miss the no-fuss configuration and the anomaly detection was well done, but I just can't do the required cloud thing it does now
It auto-detects many programs like docker, nginx and postgresql and automatically creates dashboards for them. It also has many dashboards about system internals I didn't even know were great to monitor, so it taught me a lot. For example, seeing a CPU pinned at 100% processing interrupts because of a network interface overload or having time frames with high IOwait during a SQL query clearly meaning there's some larger seq scans happening.
You also needed zero configuration, no login, etc.
Then they added multi-instance monitoring purely client side - the browser remembers other instance domains and links between them - pretty neat and completely uninvasive.
Then they introduced their cloud login, where you can monitor multiple instances remotely/together. They had a `--no-cloud` flag though if you did not want it. But by now they've removed that flag and they say patching out the cloud functionality is bypassing their license [1]. Some functionality is locked behind premium upgrades, and you get prevented from adding more than N metrics or M instances. It's still _possible_ to use netdata without going through their cloud but you have to go through a nag window every time you try to open the local UI. It's clear they don't want you to use it anymore, and I don't really feel comfortable about their default auto-updating local install any more either.
Now it's still impressive and useful, but it's much more an enterprise focusued tool than an "i have this server i want to monitor" tool.
Of course I understand they need to make money, but what used to be trivial to understand (hooks into everything in your system it can and opens a single port to display it) has become a whole huge integrated ecosystem and for me personally it's competing in the space where I'd probably rather spend the time to make a proper Prometheus/Grafana setup instead.
[1] https://github.com/netdata/netdata/discussions/17594#discuss...