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Netdata: Open-source real-time monitoring platform

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

#51

Post by sneak »

odyslam wrote: post #49
sneak wrote: post #43

Note that netdata phones home without consent in the default configuration. For many, the whole point of doing system-administration is selfhosting and autonomy, and privacy is frequently a big component of that. Netdata blows a big hole in that by transmitting your usage information off of your box without getting permission.

That's a bit unfair. In the docs we are being very upfront that you can opt-out of anonymous telemetry: https://learn.netdata.cloud/docs/get we use the data we gather in order to make smarter product decisions. We want to invest resources where it matters, so we need to know how our users use the product. We are also very detailed on what we gather: https://learn.netdata.cloud/docs/agent/netdata-security Lastly, we j…

The telemetry isn't anonymous: it includes the client IP; the method you use to transmit the data cannot work anonymously.

Additionally, what's actually unfair is that you proceed with this spying without the consent of the user. Being upfront about it is not obtaining consent: it's just informing the user you're about to violate their (lack of) consent.

You must obtain consent from the user first, before transmitting their information. Otherwise, your software is spyware. (Disclosing that you're going to spy on the user doesn't make you not-spyware.)

> we use the data we gather in order to make smarter product decisions.

Yes, you transmit the private data of the user for the express purpose of enriching yourself.

Opt-out is unethical: you must obtain opt-in consent first. The data you are transmitting does not belong to you.

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

#52

Post by PanosJee »

distantsounds wrote: post #35
crazypython wrote: post #31

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.

It has the option now to set retention for up to a year.

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

#54

Post by Abishek_Muthian »

Havoc wrote: post #2

It’s very neat for individual servers Doesn’t work well for monitoring multiple servers though from what I can tell.

Neat project but I'm also confused with 'distributed'; It sounds like designed for monitoring multiple systems in a single dashbaord OOB with 'zero-config', But on further digging it seems like the distributed monitoring works 'only' with their cloud service[1].

Further clarity on this would be appreciated.

[1] https://github.com/netdata/netdata/blob/master/docs/quicksta...

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

#55

Post by _joel »

lima wrote: post #42
_joel wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a netdata prometheus exporter, but it overlaps a lot with node-exporter. If you're already runnning netdata however then it could be a good choice

node_exporter is a lot more robust. Had both running for a while and netdata would get stuck when there's I/O trouble, while node_exporter was carefully built not to do any I/O and kept working just fine.

Yes, I'd stick to node exporer where possible.

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

#56

Post by mekster »

wongarsu wrote: post #38
tifadg1 wrote: 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.

And people are somehow meant to only monitor a single server?

There's a reason timeseries databases are trying to get downsampling right.

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

#57

Post by mdip »

mekster wrote: 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…

  > never really actionable ... only of interest for a short period ... you know where and when the problem is.
I'm not a sysadmin of a large shop (I did that for a short bit, but prior to this existing), so I can only speak as a guy who runs a few big linux servers/virtuals. I've had netdata installed on my home severs for quite some time. And yes, the graphs were really cool, at first, and kinda went into the background.

Here's the thing: when something isn't right with those boxes, that's become the first place I visit. Since I had some franken-boxes with a bunch of storage, it's often related to the array, or btrfs. When I hop in there I'll notice an alert or two, gooble it, alter something and never see it again. It helped me solve some network issues.

I don't know, short of it being a more busy process than I wish it were on my server (only a little and I'm running a few plug-ins on the one that I'm unhappy with), it's been helpful.

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

#58

Post by mdip »

odyslam wrote: post #14
xPaw wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netdata does have alarms/alerts, and comes with default ones. https://learn.netdata.cloud/guides/step-by-step/step-05

Actually, we give a lot of thought in defining sane default alarms for most of the data sources that we have. We want our users to get 80% of the value with 20% of the effort. It's an opinionated approach that liberates a lot of users from having to setup and maintain everything.

I think you took a lot of flack in the original comment[0]

The alarms in netdata resolved a long-standing network issue on one of my boxes, and have variously alerted me to problems I could resolve with storage which greatly improved performance on my largest volume. On my other box, one look at the graphs alerted me to the fact that the entire SSD for my bcache volume was going unused[1]. I then used them while altering configuration and working with the drive to ensure the cache was being filled in a manner consistent with what the volume stored/how it was used.

The more I think about it, I might not have been as enthusiastic in my original comment as I should have been. It's been very helpful to me. I don't usually keep things like this running for very long (it wastes cycles on aging hardware...that isn't heavily used, but hey, it's the principal!) but I've kept this around because every time I've thought about removing it, I've visited the dashboard one last time and found something there that made me keep it.

[0] Though, as I mentioned, I'm not a sysadmin; I have a lab that might indicate otherwise, but I don't get paid for it.

[1] I had reloaded the machine/redone a previous configuration that included bcache and it screamed; I knew my new setup was much slower but I had forgotten about it until netdata made it obvious, again. I can't remember what I had to do to fix it, but it had something to do with the policy used to determine if a file should be put into the cache, and I think it was related to the fact that the cache was added to a volume with data present that rarely changed.

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

#59

Post by edoceo »

odyslam wrote: post #49
sneak wrote: post #43

Note that netdata phones home without consent in the default configuration. For many, the whole point of doing system-administration is selfhosting and autonomy, and privacy is frequently a big component of that. Netdata blows a big hole in that by transmitting your usage information off of your box without getting permission.

That's a bit unfair. In the docs we are being very upfront that you can opt-out of anonymous telemetry: https://learn.netdata.cloud/docs/get we use the data we gather in order to make smarter product decisions. We want to invest resources where it matters, so we need to know how our users use the product. We are also very detailed on what we gather: https://learn.netdata.cloud/docs/agent/netdata-security Lastly, we j…

how about on install you prompt to opt-IN to this "feature"?

posthog or not, your target market is more sensitive to this telemetry crap than GP.

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

#60

Post by ex_amazon_sde »

odyslam wrote: post #49
sneak wrote: post #43

Note that netdata phones home without consent in the default configuration. For many, the whole point of doing system-administration is selfhosting and autonomy, and privacy is frequently a big component of that. Netdata blows a big hole in that by transmitting your usage information off of your box without getting permission.

That's a bit unfair. In the docs we are being very upfront that you can opt-out of anonymous telemetry: https://learn.netdata.cloud/docs/get we use the data we gather in order to make smarter product decisions. We want to invest resources where it matters, so we need to know how our users use the product. We are also very detailed on what we gather: https://learn.netdata.cloud/docs/agent/netdata-security Lastly, we j…

As odyslam wrote, opt-out is unethical.
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