Netdata
Netdata is a distributed, real-time performance and health monitoring platform for systems and applications. It provides granular, real-time metrics with zero configuration, offering thousands of metrics per second with minimal resource overhead. Designed for troubleshooting, root cause analysis, and capacity planning, Netdata helps DevOps teams and system administrators understand what’s happening across their entire infrastructure.
Key Features
- Real-time, high-resolution metrics — Collects and visualises thousands of metrics per second at 1-second granularity, providing immediate visibility into system performance.
- Zero-configuration monitoring — Installs in minutes and automatically detects all running services, applications, and hardware, presenting dashboards immediately without manual setup.
- Interactive, out-of-the-box dashboards — Pre-built dashboards with rich, interactive charts that allow you to zoom, pan, and highlight any metric over any time window.
- Low resource footprint — Written in C for performance, Netdata uses approximately 1% of a single CPU core and 100-200 MB of RAM to monitor the average system.
- Anomaly detection and machine learning — Built-in ML-based anomaly detection identifies unusual behaviour patterns across your metrics, flagging potential issues before they become incidents.
- Distributed architecture — Netdata nodes can be connected into a centralised Netdata Cloud view, allowing you to monitor thousands of hosts from a single dashboard without a centralised database bottleneck.
- Versatile alerting — Configurable alarms notify you via email, Slack, Discord, Telegram, PagerDuty, and dozens of other channels when metrics cross critical thresholds.
- Exportable to any time-series database — Native support for exporting metrics to Prometheus, Graphite, InfluxDB, OpenTSDB, and more, allowing integration with existing monitoring stacks.
Why Use Netdata?
Netdata fills a unique niche in the monitoring landscape — it sits between simple CPU/RAM gauges (like htop) and heavyweight enterprise monitoring stacks (like Nagios or PRTG). You get enterprise-grade visibility and forensic analysis capabilities with consumer-grade simplicity. If you run even a single server, Netdata will show you things about its performance you did not know you were missing, and the zero-configuration setup means it is genuinely useful within minutes of installation.
Use Cases
- Monitor a single web server or VPS in real time, tracking CPU, memory, disk I/O, network traffic, and application-level metrics from a single, unified dashboard.
- Deploy across an entire fleet of containers and microservices to correlate performance issues across distributed systems using Netdata Cloud.
- Feed Netdata metrics into Prometheus for long-term storage and alerting, combining granular real-time data with reliable querying and retention.
Platform
Linux · macOS · Docker · Kubernetes
Licence
GPL-3.0