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Netdata: Open-source real-time monitoring platform

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31–40 of 108 posts

Re: Netdata: Open-source real-time monitoring platform

#32
post #11

All these graphs are never really actionable and are only of interest for a short period of time and you won't be looking at it after a while because they don't mean anything unless you know where and when the problem is. A sever admin wants "Incident" panel that only shows anomaly components at the top coupled with adjustable alerting mechanism and not just a dump of all the data there is blindly. There are so many…

I agree with this, and it's interesting how many open source tools there are that create these graphs and charts, store tons of data, etc. All with a mostly "eyes on glass" bent, which doesn't scale terribly well.

When, really, what's more important is actionable events, correlation, duplicate suppression, escalating notifications, etc. Something like what "Netcool Omnibus" and other commercial software does. Isolate actionable problems and make sure somebody owns the problem.

But for reasons I don't understand, there isn't much in the open source world in that space.

Re: Netdata: Open-source real-time monitoring platform

#34

Netdata is a great building block in a monitoring system. It now does a lot of monitoring via eBPF, connects to Prometheus, and integrates with k8s.

We do love ebpf. Guilty as charged ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

We have a whole bunch of metrics that we keep track and we are currently implementing a load more.

Soonish, we will greatly increase the number of metrics that we gather with ebpf. That coupled with our per-second granularity, should give you a very detailed view of the system.

Docs: https://learn.netdata.cloud/docs/agent/collectors/ebpf.plugi... Community Forums discussion: https://community.netdata.cloud/t/linux-kernel-insights-with...

Re: Netdata: Open-source real-time monitoring platform

#35

Haven't been able to use its graphical interface to view historical data. At least it uses fewer resources than Grafana.

netdata doesn't store metrics historically but you can funnel whatever ones you want out and ship them off to a log store like graphite or opentsdb.

Re: Netdata: Open-source real-time monitoring platform

#37
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using Netdata Cloud is a great way not to spend any time with that and access the Agent's dashboard through Netdata Cloud. We use WSS and MQTT, so it's super secure and lightweight. The data are streamed from the Agent directly to your browser via the cloud. Relevant docs: https://learn.netdata.cloud/docs/configure/secure-nodes#disa...

So the only convenient way to have security is to use the cloud version? Got it.

yes, because a 10 line nginx config with basic http auth is too difficult for a sysadmin to set up in conjunction with his systems monitoring tool

stop being obtuse

Re: Netdata: Open-source real-time monitoring platform

#38
post #24

Could someone enlighten me on the internals, how is netdata able to get realtime granularity, whereas prometheus defaults to 15s?

I doesn't store much history from what I can tell. If you don't have years worth of data points then having 15 times as many isn't a big deal.

Re: Netdata: Open-source real-time monitoring platform

#39

I write and maintain an open source monitoring tool and I looked into adding a mode to output metrics in Netdata format and ran away screaming. It's just an unstructured text format where you output commands to stdout, one per line. Each command consists of whitespace-separated fields. Which field is the units? Oh, the 4th. And some fields are optional, I'm not even sure how that works but I think you can't skip an o…

Netdata can ingest prometheus metrics as well, so you can just use that format. Eventually everything will become Openmetrics/Opentelemetry

Re: Netdata: Open-source real-time monitoring platform

#40
post #11

All these graphs are never really actionable and are only of interest for a short period of time and you won't be looking at it after a while because they don't mean anything unless you know where and when the problem is. A sever admin wants "Incident" panel that only shows anomaly components at the top coupled with adjustable alerting mechanism and not just a dump of all the data there is blindly. There are so many…

Disclaimer - i work at Netdata Cloud on ML. This is one of the things i am focusing on most - how to package and then surface up "anomaly events" to the user that the user can then quickly digest and decide if they are or are not something that could represent an "incident". So human in the loop sort of ML to help assist and lower the cognitive load of all the charts. We have a first step on this ladder via the pytho…

What's the argument for anomaly detection - it's an obvious thing to do that has been tried many times, but doesn't actually seem to provide much value in practice (especially at large scale, where you'll get spurious correlations).

What would you need it for? Once you defined your SLOs, either your service meets them or not. What's the value in alerting someone that "this graph looks funny"?

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