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Netdata: Open-source real-time monitoring platform

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

#61

Post by fatlasp »

mdip wrote: post #57
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 backgro…

Same. I'm not a fully qualified sys admin but I do have access to a number of our servers (I'm more of a full stack generalist than an expert at anything) and I immediately go to netdata when one of my services isn't acting right. For me its a nice 'system at a glance' where I can check on the host and then alert someone more knowledgeable than myself if there's something that looks off

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

#62

Post by ktsaou »

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…

Thank you for this feedback. I am the founder of Netdata.

Netdata is about making our lives easier. If you need to tweak Netdata, please open a github issue to let us know. It is a bug. Netdata should provide the best possible dashboards and alerts out of the box. If it does not for you, we missed something and we need your help to fix it, so please open a github issue to let us know of your use case. We want Netdata to be installed and effectively used with zero configuration, even mid-crisis, so although tweaking is possible and we support plenty of it, it should not be required.

An "incident" is a way to organize people, an issue management tool for monitoring, a collaboration feature. Netdata's primary goal however, is about exploring and understanding our infrastructure. We are trying to be amazingly effective in this by providing unlimited high resolution metrics, real-time dashboards and battle tested alarms. In our roadmap we have many features that we believe will change the way we understand monitoring. We are changing even the most fundamental features of a chart.

Of course at the same time we are trying to improve collaboration. This is why Netdata.Cloud, our free-forever SaaS offering that complements the open-source agent to provide out of the box infrastructure-level monitoring along side several convenience features, organizes our infra in war-rooms. In these war-rooms we have added metrics correlation tools that can help us find the most relevant metrics for something that got our attention, an alarm, a spike or a dive on a chart.

For Netdata, the high level incident panel you are looking for, will be based on a mix of charts and alarms. And we hope it is going to be also fully automated, autodetected and provided with zero configuration and tweaking. Stay tuned. We are baking it...

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

#63

Post by ktsaou »

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.

Hi. I am the founder of Netdata.

We complement the Netdata agent with Netdata.Cloud, a free-forever SaaS offering that maintains all the principles of the Netdata agent, while providing infrastructure level monitoring and several additional convenience features.

In Netdata.Cloud, infrastructure is organized in war-rooms. On each war-room you will find the "Overview" page, that provides a fully automated dashboard, very similar to the one provided by the agent, in which every chart presented aggregates data from all servers in the war-room! Magic! Zero configuration! Fully automated!

Keep in mind that Netdata.Cloud is a thin convenience layer on top of the Netdata agent. We don't aggregate your data. Your data stay inside your servers. We only collect and store a few metadata (how many netdata agents you have, which metrics they collect, what alarms have been configured, when they triggered - but not the actual metric and log data of your systems).

Try it! You will be surprised!

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

#64

Post by goodpoint »

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…

Netdata is focused on short-term, real-time metrics. I use it often during development.

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

#65

Post by napsterbr »

sammy2244 wrote: post #15
odyslam wrote: 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.

That's the key difference between self-hosted and SaaS. If you self-host, you are responsible for setting up the required infrastructure, taking care of updates, backups etc.

If setting up a reverse proxy behind whatever monitoring you've got is too much, then yes, by all means use the SaaS offering -- but that's 100% the user responsibility, and there's no need to be snarky about it.

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

#66

Post by toomanybeersies »

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…

There's value in having large dashboards that contain a bunch of non-prioritised graphs and gauges. I've managed to find a fair few problems by scrolling through such dashboards. Usually it's due to poorly configured monitors/alerts, but sometimes I'll spot things that you wouldn't reasonably expect an algorithm to pick up.

Plus it's good fun to look at a big dashboard and pretend you're Homer Simpson at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant.

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

#67

Post by nednar »

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…

You seem to have a very specific vision. Could you mock it somehow? HTML, Figma, Paint, Powerpoint, whatever? Quite curious about ideas.

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

#68

Post by andrewm4894 »

lima wrote: post #40
andrewm4894 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

I almost think of anomaly detection as a UI/UX type tool to help users navigate the data/systems. So use ML to find "interesting" or "novel" periods of time in your architecture (in the sense that the ML thinks they look novel based on some model), and then enable a user who is ultimately best placed to decide if it's actually of real interest to them or more like a false positive that they can just ignore and move on.

So doing it in a way where you can quickly scan such events i think could be useful even if only 1 in 20 actually turn out to be some potential problem that might have been missed by your alarms or maybe could even be a precursor to some impact on SLO's etc.

The aim would also be "this collection of graphs look funny at the same time" as opposed to "the individual graph looks funny" as if you have an anomaly score for every chart for sure at any given moment some individual charts would be randomly firing. But when you pool the information across charts and hosts and systems the hope is that then you can use anomaly detection as another way to explore your system and catch when things change unexpectedly.

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

#69

Post by Croftengea »

ktsaou wrote: post #62
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…

Thank you for this feedback. I am the founder of Netdata. Netdata is about making our lives easier. If you need to tweak Netdata, please open a github issue to let us know. It is a bug. Netdata should provide the best possible dashboards and alerts out of the box. If it does not for you, we missed something and we need your help to fix it, so please open a github issue to let us know of your use case. We want Netdata…

> our free-forever SaaS offering that complements the open-source agent

How do you make or plan to make money?

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

#70

Post by toomanybeersies »

lima wrote: post #40
andrewm4894 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

> What's the value in alerting someone that "this graph looks funny"?

What's the value in mentioning to someone that the chicken they're about to eat looks a bit raw?

It stops them from eating it and getting food poisoning.

Anomalies are often warnings (harbingers?) of a problem which could lead to a fault and downtime.

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