Netdata - impressive and free server monitoring software

[The Old Man]

Fellow server admins, have you heard of or tried Netdata?

I was looking for a worthwhile free, open source alternative to the horrendously expensive but modern style New Relic, but something that had a modern and useful UI that didn't look like it came from 1995 (munin anyone?)

https://my-netdata.io/

Nice real world demos here, try the London one:

https://my-netdata.io/#demosites

The default is a dark theme but you can switch to a white theme too.

You can monitor your server hardware and also it has plug-ins (currently manually added at the SSH command line) for adding PHP-FPM, MariaDB, Mysql, Redis, Nginx, Apache and app monitoring etc:

https://github.com/netdata/netdata/blob/master/docs/Add-more-charts-to-netdata.md#add-more-charts-to-netdata

Introduction and docs:

https://docs.netdata.cloud/

Install docs, I used the one line installer option:

https://docs.netdata.cloud/packaging/installer/

It's very light weight resource wise, and I like the touch friendly graphs and charts. It sometimes feels a bit betary, but the devs are doing a great job. They recently added a cloud intergration for managing multiple servers or nodes via one account. 

Could be one to watch if you haven't heard of it. 😁

[ASTRAPI]

Yes I am using it and is very lightweight monitoring tool with many details!!!

It may be a bit tricky to add new stats that are not supported by default ....

The developer Kostas is a good friend of me also 👍

[The Old Man]

Thanks Astrapi, I agree adding custom plugins is a bit fiddly. I added Redis, Mysql and PHP-FPM to my CentOS7 server along with weblog, it's nice to see what's happening in real time, such as when you recount members content and you can see the server working away in another tab.  

Have you had any issues using it with CentOS7 and Apache? After rebooting only a couple of the external plugins I enabled show up again unless I restart Netdata manually via SSH. Although the install went okay and I've updated a few times, if I try to start Netdata with systemctrl it keeps refusing:

systemctl restart netdata.service
Failed to restart netdata.service: Unit is not loaded properly: Invalid argument.
See system logs and 'systemctl status netdata.service' for details.
root@vpsxxx [~]# systemctl status netdata.service
● netdata.service
   Loaded: error (Reason: Invalid argument)
   Active: inactive (dead)
root@vpsxxx [~]# 

If I start it manually by killing Netdata and restarting at the command line, most of my extra plugins for Redis etc reappear!

[ASTRAPI]

I am using it on Nginx servers as i have many years to use Apache and never had any issues with Centos 7 and netdata but i don't think that Apache or Nginx is the problem as Netdata uses it's own web server .....

Something else is the issue...

You can try the:

systemctl status netdata.service

and see what's the problem...

[The Old Man]

Many thanks. I did try the sytemctl command it wasn't much help. As above it just says invalid argument, but doesn't state what it is invalid.

[ASTRAPI]

Try re installing maybe?

[The Old Man]

Thanks, yes I had to reinstall it and it is fine now. Not sure what the issue was as it installed new versions automatically itself, but completely removing and reinstalling did the trick.

[AlexJ]

Thank you for sharing this info! 

[AlexJ]

@The Old Man  - Any easy way to secure the stats page? I see it can be done through Apache - but any another way which is much easier? 

[ASTRAPI]

.htaccess for Apache and a rewrite rule for Nginx seems to be the way to do it 🙂

[The Old Man]

Hi,

I haven't added https to it but it looks like they may have finished adding it to the nightly releases as I spotted some entries for adding SSL cert paths a few days ago. I've just limited it to localhost for now using the web section of variables in Netdata.conf, so I will have to have a play.

Hopefully they will add a handy configuration page via the cloud url server nodes where you could toggle on/off settings instead of editing the conf file manually.

[Fast Lane!]

Datadoghq.com is great as well.

[AlexJ]

4 hours ago, Fast Lane! said:

Datadoghq.com is great as well.

That's paid - no? 

@The Old Man - is their any way to restrict the access based on IP? or IP Tables is the way to go? 

[The Old Man]

11 hours ago, AlexJ said:

 

@The Old Man - is their any way to restrict the access based on IP? or IP Tables is the way to go? 

Hi Alex,

They have a security guide which seems to cover this, access based on IP. 

https://github.com/netdata/netdata/blob/master/docs/netdata-security.md

Regards

[Fast Lane!]

On 6/19/2019 at 3:27 PM, AlexJ said:

That's paid - no? 

@The Old Man - is their any way to restrict the access based on IP? or IP Tables is the way to go? 

No the free plan is pretty good.

[Lotus123]

I was considering using Kibana + Beats for monitoring - https://www.elastic.co/products/

Since we’re already using ElasticSearch, it does also integrate fairly well into those systems.