Netdata is an

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

tool designed to collect real-time metrics, such as CPU usage, disk activity, bandwidth usage, website visits, etc., and then display them in live, easy-to-interpret charts. The tool is designed to visualize activity in the greatest possible detail, allowing the user to obtain an overview of what is happening and what has just happened in their system or application.

Overview

''Netdata'' consists of a

daemon Daimon or Daemon (Ancient Greek: , "god", "godlike", "power", "fate") originally referred to a lesser deity or guiding spirit such as the daimons of ancient Greek religion and mythology and of later Hellenistic religion and philosophy. The wo ...

that, when executed, is responsible for collecting and displaying information in real-time. It is a lightweight tool, mostly written in C, Python, and

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...

, which uses minimal resources: about 2% on a single-CPU system. It can be run in any Linux system to monitor any system or application, and is capable of running on PCs, servers, and embedded Linux devices.

Features

''Netdata'' is designed to be installed on a system without interrupting any of the applications running on it. It operates according to the memory requirements specified by the user, using only idle CPU cycles. Once the application begins, it will not perform disk I/O beyond logging. The tool saves to disk at the end of its execution and reloads at startup. By default it contains certain plugins that collect key system metrics, but its behavior is extensible by using its plugin API. ''Netdata'' can be run on virtually anything utilizing a Linux kernel and its graphics can be embedded into web pages. It has an interface with customizable themes and can be manually configured by the user, through simple HTML. There are no dependencies, as it operates as its own web server, with static web files. Starting with v1.12, ''Netdata'' collects anonymous usage information by default and sends it to

Google Analytics Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic, currently as a platform inside the Google Marketing Platform brand. Google launched the service in November 2005 after acquiring Urchin. As o ...

, a feature which can be disabled via manual configuration.

Operation

When executing the daemon on Linux using the netdata command, threads are generated that collect information from each resource, using internal and/or external plugins. In turn, it keeps a record of the values collected in memory (without doing any Disk I/O). It operates as a stand-alone web server for its own static files, necessary for the representation of its dashboards. It provides a REST API so that the browser can access the information. Each installation of the application works autonomously. Although different running instances of the application can be saved to one dashboard, every ''Netdata'' instance is independent. Only the browser can connect all installations of different systems, unifying graphics from different sources as if they came from the same server.

Development

''Netdata'' is currently maintained by nearly 400 contributors, all helping (at various levels) to serve the thousands of individual users and businesses who utilize this tool. The user with the most contributions is currently Costa Tsaousis, the CEO and Founder of ''Netdata'', with over 600,000 additions to the code. The second most-active user is Ilya Mashchenko. The all-time most popular addition to ''Netdata'' appears to be adding support for data collection from

Vnstat vnStat is a network utility for the Linux operating system. It uses a command line interface. vnStat command is a console-based network traffic monitor. It keeps a log of hourly, daily and monthly network traffic for the selected interface(s) b ...

, a pull request by Noah Troy with nearly 200 individual comments (more than any other pull request). The all-time most popular feature request appears to be adding support for running multiple freeipmi jobs from the same ''Netdata''.

References

External links