My Experience with Netdata

Netdata is an open-source monitoring application. After conducting research, I decided that it was the most suitable monitoring solution for my situation.

I manage my hobby and learning projects on a Linux-based server with limited resources. Therefore, resource consumption was the most important criterion for me in this selection. There is a detailed article comparing the resources used by Netdata and Prometheus under high load. The summary is that Netdata uses fewer resources than Prometheus under the specified load. After reviewing user reviews, I decided to try the application.

Installing the application is quite simple — following the official documentation for native Linux packages is sufficient to get the agent running. One aspect I don't like is that the application does not have a built-in local authentication mechanism. Instead, authentication must be provided through an Nginx reverse proxy. There is official documentation for that setup as well.

Frankly, the application more than met my needs. My requirement was to view the server's resource consumption and which process was consuming how much. I used to do this with the top(1) program. Viewing this data through graphs on a web interface is definitely much simpler and more functional.

Netdata does not only display processes on the server. Depending on the plugins you enable, you can view many different metrics. In addition to the core metrics, my favorite feature is viewing the IP addresses currently banned and failed login attempts in fail2ban. Being able to view the resource usage of Docker containers separately is also a feature I really appreciate.

Another metric I track is the number and types of Nginx requests and responses. For example, if I see traffic above normal for five minutes and most of the responses from my server are in the 5XX or 4XX categories, I can tell that a scan is being performed on the server. These are usually automated scans for indexing or general security vulnerability testing.

Personally, it meets my needs and I am quite satisfied at the moment. Of course, this does not mean it is the best solution under all circumstances. In the future, I may try Prometheus as well, and when I do, I will write a comparison article.

I am eager to hear about your experiences with monitoring applications.