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Netdata: Open-source real-time monitoring platform

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

#71

Post by chrisandchris »

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…

So true.

But netdata also supports alerts by e-mail or HTTP-based (e.g. for Slack), so why not just turn on notifications and live from them?

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

#72

Post by jeffbee »

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…

Based on my experience a dashboard that you only use when you know where and when the problem occurred is incredibly useful, and the lack of one can be very frustrating. While you of course need a systematic approach to incident detection, you also need comprehensive eyes-on-glass dashboards during your investigations. "Anomaly detection" is much spoken of but generalized anomaly detection doesn't exist. You still need skilled operators to just have a look around in many cases.

An example, drawn from several major incidents in my career. You get an alert, you narrow it down to a process or machine, you evict the machine from your serving population to remediate the incident, but how do you keep it from recurring? The anomalous thing isn't apparent in your monitoring data, so it must be among the bazillion statistics that a running system exposes, but which you can't afford to collect and monitor on a per-host, per-container, per-process level of detail. That's when you want something exactly like netdata!

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

#73

Post by distantsounds »

PanosJee wrote: post #52
distantsounds wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

ooh, even better!

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

#74

Post by mtmsr »

I have played around with netdata just yesterday on my home server. Great tool, but the defaults are overkill for my needs. After spending an hour trying to simplify (=disable most of the "collectors") using the documentation, I finally gave up.

Settled on neofetch [1] instead: pure bash, wrote my own custom inputs including color coding for incident reporting in less time than it took me to strip down netdata. Highly recommended if you want to spend your time on other things than (setting up) server monitoring.

[1] https://github.com/dylanaraps/neofetch

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

#75

Post by PixyMisa »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #48
distantsounds wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's not that it's too difficult, but we were accustomed to having this functionality built in in similar products in the past, then things changed. When ELK first showed up there was a big wave of attacks on ELK servers because they were completely unsecured and at that time X-Pack Security was a paid add-on, they changed their mind later, some time after an open source solution appeared.

Absolutely. It has to be there, and users have to be forced to configure it at install time.

How many times do we need to repeat this mistake?

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

#76

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

napsterbr wrote: post #65
sammy2244 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> If you self-host, you are responsible for setting up the required infrastructure, taking care of updates, backups etc.

Are you speaking about Netdata or in general? Because if the former, then at least the updates part is not true: the installation script turns out nightly updates (and telemetry).

Frankly, the reason there is no basic auth is that Netdata doesn't use a third-party web server but a built-in one, so they would have to add this functionality.

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

#77

Post by yunohn »

sneak wrote: post #51
odyslam wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 transmittin…

Dude, seriously?

You choose to willfully install Netdata. You have to read the docs where the opt-out telemetry is clearly explained, before you can self-host it too. If you care, you can disable it.

I honestly don’t understand HN. Multiple commenters deriding a free open-source project for having basic telemetry to understand feature usage.

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

#78

Post by manigandham »

mekster wrote: post #56
wongarsu wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a locally installed agent that monitors and serves metrics on the same host. If you want to monitor multiple hosts then you can either visit the dashboards individually, or scrape the APIs and put the metrics on a combined dashboard - which is what Netdata Cloud is.

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

#79

Post by nawgz »

Croftengea wrote: post #69
ktsaou wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This is a good question, their website doesn't seem to have any "Pricing" information anywhere and everything is "get now" and "sign up for free"...

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

#80

Post by ohthehugemanate »

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…

> 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.

Netdata does this too, with a ton of thresholds already set up by default. The list of active alerts is at the top, with a badge and everything. Notifications use a hook system, so you can use whatever mechanism you like. Personally I get emails for medium level alerts, SMS for high and above, and wall posts/notifications on my primary machine for crits. It took some tuning to get the thresholds right for me, all perfectly easy to do.

I agree I would prefer to have the active warnings more visible than the graphs, but one click away really isn't bad.

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