Skip to main content

· 10 min read
Hugo Valente

IoT Network

With the increasing prevalence of IoT devices, which are being used in a wide range of applications, from smart homes and cities to industrial and agricultural systems, monitoring thei performance and health is extremely important. However, it’s essential to remember that monitoring IoT devices involves more than just tracking device-level data. In addition, monitoring data from the IoT platform or application layer is equally important.

We’ll explore some of these topics in more detail and explain how Netdata can play an essential role in the monitoring of such devices, including some hints on how it can be set up for maximum performance in such scenarios.

· 2 min read
Satyadeep Ashwathnarayana

Alerts Configuration Manager Netdata introduces its latest feature, the Alerts Configuration Manager, transforming the way users configure and manage alerts in their Netdata environment. This powerful tool integrates directly into the Netdata Dashboard, offering a streamlined and intuitive interface for both novice and experienced users.

· 8 min read
Satyadeep Ashwathnarayana

Netdata Cost Transparency

Businesses are increasingly reliant on monitoring tools to ensure the seamless performance and reliability of their systems. However, the true cost of implementing and maintaining these tools is often obscured by hidden expenses. Our previous blog delved into the concealed costs associated with various monitoring solutions, such as Prometheus & Grafana (Open Source Monitoring) and commercial platforms like Datadog, Dynatrace, and NewRelic. These costs can manifest in various forms - from complex setups and maintenance to additional charges for advanced features.

Unlike its counterparts, Netdata is engineered with transparency and efficiency at its core, ensuring that organizations can monitor their systems effectively without incurring unexpected expenses. This blog will explore how Netdata stands out in the crowded field of monitoring tools by eliminating hidden costs, providing a detailed analysis of its unique features and advantages.

Let us explore how Netdata’s user-friendly approach, unlimited metrics collection, decentralized architecture, and comprehensive capabilities make it a holistic solution for cost-effective monitoring.

· 5 min read

The Netdata Methodology

In the dynamic landscape of modern infrastructure and multi cloud environments, observing and understanding system performance requires a new breed of tools—ones that keep pace with the 'living' nature of modern infrastructure. This is the inflection point at which Netdata steps in, and aims to bring a fresh perspective to monitoring.

· 13 min read

Netdata Best Practices

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.

· 7 min read
Satyadeep Ashwathnarayana

systemd-journal-system-operators

System operators know the drill: as the complexity of systems scales, so does the deluge of logs. Traditionally, taming this relentless tide demands a concoction of costly tools and laborious configurations—until now. The dynamic duo of systemd-journal and Netdata is revolutionizing log management, turning what was once a Herculean task into a streamlined, powerful, and surprisingly straightforward process.

· 14 min read
Costa Tsaousis

Netdata Prometheus Comparison

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.

Our ambition is to be the simplest, fastest and most scalable solution in this domain. However, it's essential to approach it with modesty. A performance comparison between Netdata and Prometheus is not a race for the top spot but an exploration of where we stand today and where improvements can be made. Through this, we hope to drive innovation, ensure optimal performance, and ultimately deliver better value to our users.

· 3 min read
Shyam Sreevalsan

systemd - netdata

Today, we released our systemd journal plugin for Netdata, allowing you to explore, view, search, filter and analyze systemd journal logs.

Like most things about Netdata, this is a zero-configuration plugin. You don’t have to do anything apart from installing Netdata on your systems.This is key design direction for Netdata, since we want Netdata to be able to help even if you install it mid-crisis, while you have an incident at hand.

· 3 min read
Costa Tsaousis

image

“Why bother with it? I let it run in the background and focus on more important DevOps work.” a random DevOps Engineer at Reddit r/devops

In an era where technology is evolving at breakneck speeds, it's easy to overlook the tools that are right under our noses. One such underutilized powerhouse is the systemd journal. For many, it's a mere tool to check the status of systemd service units or to tail the most recent events (journalctl -f). Others who do mainly container work, ignore even its existence.

What is the purpose of systemd-journal?

However, the systemd journal includes very important information. Kernel errors, application crashes, out of memory process kills, storage related anomalies, crucial security intel like ssh or sudo attempts and security audit logs, connection / disconnection errors, network related problems, and a lot more. The system journal is brimming with data that can offer deep insights into the health and security of our systems and still many professional system and devops engineers tend to ignore it.

· 11 min read
Satyadeep Ashwathnarayana

netdata-prometheus-grafana-stack

In this blog, we will walk you through the basics of getting Netdata, Prometheus and Grafana all working together and monitoring your application servers. This article will be using docker on your local workstation. We will be working with docker in an ad-hoc way, launching containers that run /bin/bash and attaching a TTY to them. We use docker here in a purely academic fashion and do not condone running Netdata in a container. We pick this method so individuals without cloud accounts or access to VMs can try this out and for it's speed of deployment.

· 7 min read
Satyadeep Ashwathnarayana

netdata-prometheus-grafana-stack

Netdata reads /proc/<pid>/stat for all processes, once per second and extracts utime and stime (user and system cpu utilization), much like all the console tools do.

But it also extracts cutime and cstime that account the user and system time of the exit children of each process. By keeping a map in memory of the whole process tree, it is capable of assigning the right time to every process, taking into account all its exited children.

It is tricky, since a process may be running for 1 hour and once it exits, its parent should not receive the whole 1 hour of cpu time in just 1 second - you have to subtract the cpu time that has been reported for it prior to this iteration.

It is even trickier, because walking through the entire process tree takes some time itself. So, if you sum the CPU utilization of all processes, you might have more CPU time than the reported total cpu time of the system. Netdata solves this, by adapting the per process cpu utilization to the total of the system.

· 9 min read
Satyadeep Ashwathnarayana

netdata-qos-classes

Netdata monitors tc QoS classes for all interfaces.

If you also use FireQOS it will collect interface and class names.

There is a shell helper for this (all parsing is done by the plugin in C code - this shell script is just a configuration for the command to run to get tc output).

The source of the tc plugin is here. It is somewhat complex, because a state machine was needed to keep track of all the tc classes, including the pseudo classes tc dynamically creates.

You can see a live demo here.

· 4 min read
Andrew Maguire

node-anomaly-rate-alert

Over the last few years we have slowly and methodically been building out the ML based capabilities of the Netdata agent, dogfooding and iterating as we go. To date, these features have mostly been somewhat reactive and tools to aid once you are already troubleshooting.

Now we feel we are ready to take a first gentle step into some more proactive use cases, starting with a simple node level anomaly rate alert.

· 3 min read
Andrew Maguire

netdata-ansible

We are always trying to lower the barrier to entry when it comes to monitoring and observability and one place we have consistently witnessed some pain from users is around adopting and approaching configuration management tools and practices as your infrastructure grows and becomes more complex.

To that end, we have begun recently publishing our own little example ansible project used to maintain and manage the servers used in our public Machine Learning Demo room.

This post introduces this project as a somewhat simple example of using Ansible with Netdata. Read on to learn more, but more importantly feel free to explore the repo and see how it all hangs together.

· 14 min read
Satyadeep Ashwathnarayana

stacked-netdata

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.

This “distributed still centralized” setup provides a lot of benefits. Let’s go through them one by one in this blog post.

· 11 min read

In this blog post, we will explore the importance of scalability, automation, and AI in the evolving landscape of infrastructure monitoring. We will examine how Netdata's innovative solution aligns with these emerging trends, and how it can empower organizations to effectively manage their modern IT infrastructure.

· 11 min read
Satyadeep Ashwathnarayana

stacked-netdata

In today's fast-paced digital landscape, 24-hour operations centers play a crucial role in managing and monitoring large-scale infrastructures. These centers must be equipped with an effective monitoring solution that addresses their unique needs, enabling them to respond quickly to incidents and maintain optimal system performance. Netdata, a comprehensive monitoring solution, has been designed to meet these critical requirements with its advanced capabilities and recent enhancements.

In this article, we will explore how Netdata's powerful features can transform the way 24-hour operations centers monitor and manage their complex environments, leading to improved incident detection, faster troubleshooting, and better overall system performance.

· 7 min read

The advent of multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud architectures has created new opportunities for organizations to leverage best-in-class features from various cloud service providers. However, these complex environments present their own unique challenges, especially when it comes to monitoring and managing performance.

· 13 min read
Satyadeep Ashwathnarayana

stacked-netdata

Netdata provides a comprehensive set of charts that can help you understand the workload, performance, utilization, saturation, latency, responsiveness, and maintenance activities of your disks. In this blog we will focus on monitoring disks as block devices, not as filesystems or mount points.

· 12 min read
Satyadeep Ashwathnarayana

stacked-netdata

Memory-intensive applications can benefit from improved performance by using huge pages, as they can reduce TLB pressure and memory fragmentation, and lower the memory management overhead overall. Developers should consider using HugeTLBfs in their mmap() and shmget() calls to take advantage of huge pages.

Transparent Huge Pages (THP) is a Linux kernel feature that provides some of the benefits of huge pages without requiring any development effort. However, THP can cause latency in many applications. Although kernel developers are actively working to address these issues, many system administrators prefer to disable THP altogether.

Netdata can assist in determining whether THP is helpful or harmful to your applications, which can guide your decision regarding its use.

· 9 min read
Satyadeep Ashwathnarayana

stacked-netdata

The mem.kernel chart in Netdata provides insight into the memory usage of various kernel subsystems and mechanisms. By understanding these dimensions and their technical details, you can monitor your system's kernel memory usage and identify potential issues or inefficiencies. Monitoring these dimensions can help you ensure that your system is running efficiently and provide valuable insights into the performance of your kernel and memory subsystem.

mem-kernel

· 11 min read
Satyadeep Ashwathnarayana

stacked-netdata

Entropy is a measure of the randomness or unpredictability of data. In the context of cryptography, entropy is used to generate random numbers or keys that are essential for secure communication and encryption. Without a good source of entropy, cryptographic protocols can become vulnerable to attacks that exploit the predictability of the generated keys.

· 4 min read
Satyadeep Ashwathnarayana

stacked-netdata

Swap memory, also known as virtual memory, is a space on a hard disk that is used to supplement the physical memory (RAM) of a computer. The swap space is used when the system runs out of physical memory, and it moves less frequently accessed data from RAM to the hard disk, freeing up space in RAM for more frequently accessed data. But should swap memory be enabled on production systems and cloud-provided virtual machines (VMs)? Let's explore the pros and cons.

· 5 min read
Satyadeep Ashwathnarayana

stacked-netdata

Context switching is the process of switching the CPU from one process, task or thread to another. In a multitasking operating system, such as Linux, the CPU has to switch between multiple processes or threads in order to keep the system running smoothly. This is necessary because each CPU core without hyperthreading can only execute one process or thread at a time. If there are many processes or threads running simultaneously, and very few CPU cores available to handle them, the system is forced to make more context switches to balance the CPU resources among them.

Context switching is an essential function of any multitasking operating system, but it also comes at a cost. The whole process is computationally intensive, and the more context switches that occur, the slower the system becomes. This is because each context switch involves saving the current state of the CPU, loading the state of the new process or thread, and then resuming execution of the new process or thread. This takes time and consumes CPU resources, which can slow down the system.

The impact of context switching on system performance can be significant, especially in systems with many processes or threads running simultaneously.

· 14 min read
Satyadeep Ashwathnarayana

stacked-netdata

As a system administrator, understanding how your Linux system's CPU is being utilized is crucial for identifying bottlenecks and optimizing performance. In this blog post, we'll dive deep into the world of Linux CPU consumption, load, and pressure, and discuss how to use these metrics effectively to identify issues and improve your system's performance.

· 3 min read
Shyam Sreevalsan

img

Hello, fellow data enthusiasts and Google Colab aficionados! Today, we're going to explore how to monitor your Google Colab instances using Netdata. Colab is a fantastic platform for running Notebooks, developing ML models, and other data science and analytics tasks. But have you ever wondered how your Colab instance is performing under the hood? That's where Netdata comes into play!

· 6 min read
Austin S. Hemmelgarn

At Netdata, we’re committed to trying to make Netdata work as well as possible for our users. Sometimes though, that means changing things in ways that aren’t exactly seamless. Such a change is coming soon for users of our native DEB and RPM packages, and this blog post will explain what’s happening, why we’re doing it, and what it means for our users.

· 4 min read
Andrew Maguire

img

We have recently extended the native machine learning (ML) based anomaly detection capabilities of Netdata to support all metrics, regardless on their collection frequency (update every).

Previously only metrics collected every second were supported, but now Netdata can run anomaly detection out of the box with zero config on metrics with any collection frequency.

This post will illustrate an example of what this means using Prometheus metrics (via the Netdata Prometheus collector) since they typically have a default collection frequency of 10 seconds.

· 9 min read
Andrew Maguire

img

We recently got this great feedback from a dear user in our Discord:

I would really like to use Netdata to monitor custom internal metrics that come from SQL, not a fan of having 10 diff systems doing essentially the same thing as is, Netdata is pretty much all there in that regard, just needs a few extra features.

This is great and exactly what we want, a clear problem or improvement we could make to help make that users monitoring life a little easier.

This is also where the beauty of open source comes in and being able to build on the shoulders of giants - adding such a feature turned out to be pretty easy by just extending our existing Pandas collector to support SQL queries leveraging its read_sql() capabilities.

Here is the PR that was merged a few days later.

This blog post will cover an example of using the Pandas collector to monitor some custom SQL metrics from a WordPress MySQL database.

· 9 min read
Andrew Maguire

extending-anomaly-detection-training-window

We have been busy at work under the hood of the Netdata agent to introduce new capabilities that let you extend the "training window" used by Netdata's native anomaly detection capabilities.

This blog post will discuss one of these improvements to help you reduce "false positives" by essentially extending the training window by using the new (beautifully named) number of models per dimension configuration parameter.

· 38 min read

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.

Integration with Grafana for custom dashboards, using Netdata Cloud as an infrastructure-wide time-series data source for metrics

PostgreSQL monitoring completely rewritten offering state of the art monitoring of the database performance and health, even at the table and index level.

· 5 min read
Satyadeep Ashwathnarayana

Web servers are among the most important components in modern IT infrastructures. They host the websites, web services, and web applications that we use on a daily basis. Social networking, media streaming, software as a service (SaaS), and other activities wouldn’t be possible without the use of web servers. And with the advent of cloud computing and the movement of more services online, web servers and their monitoring are only becoming more important. Given the extensive usage of Web servers, Sysadmins and SREs should monitor web servers as a key aspect for performance.

logo

· 3 min read
Chris Akritidis

The life of a sysadmin or SRE is often difficult, but occasionally very simple things can make a huge difference. Basic monitoring of your systemd services is one of those simple things, which we sometimes overlook. The simplest question one would want to know is if the thing that’s supposed to be running is actually running at all. If you use systemd services, you can guarantee an answer to that question within minutes using Netdata.

· 5 min read
Chris Akritidis

The HTTP protocol has become the de facto standard application layer protocol of the internet. From publicly available web sites and APIs to “inter-process” communications in REST based microservice architectures or large Service Oriented Architectures based on SOAP, you find HTTP being used again and again, due to its simplicity and our familiarity with it. How many protocols can you name that have memes for their status codes? Of course, such a popular protocol has endless pages written about how to properly monitor the services that rely on it, with many options specific to every use case.

· 3 min read
Satyadeep Ashwathnarayana

It is sometimes easy to get lost in the mountain of metrics and infinite number of dimensions when working with an infrastructure monitoring tool. Being able to filter metrics by label and visualize only what is relevant to the current scope of monitoring &troubleshooting, becomes absolutely crucial to the success of SREs, Sysadmins and DevOps professionals.