Thanks for your thoughts.
Your concerns mirror mine, so if paranoid, we have at least each other for company.
I've gone ahead and installed it sandboxed within a container. It certainly is slick as shown by the attached screenshot.
Netdata_screenshot.jpg
I was motivated to look for something because I have a Nextcloud server that keeps hard crashing on me, freezing the kernel and not recoverable even with SysRq. Triage is proving elusive and difficult, but hints at something to do with ZFS, which I need for LXD. However, the Linux implementation of ZFS is very obscure and is missing analytical tools, especially with arc status. Scrounging around, I came upon Netdata, which I had never heard of before either.
To my surprise, it's available in the repos:
Code:
duckhook@Zeus:~$ apt show netdata
Package: netdata
Version: 1.19.0-3ubuntu1
Priority: optional
Section: universe/net
Origin: Ubuntu
Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers <ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com>
Original-Maintainer: Lennart Weller <lhw@ring0.de>
Bugs: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+filebug
Installed-Size: 38.9 kB
Depends: netdata-core | netdata-core-no-sse, netdata-plugins-bash, netdata-web
Recommends: netdata-plugins-nodejs, netdata-plugins-python
Homepage: https://github.com/netdata/netdata
Download-Size: 8,156 B
APT-Sources: http://ca.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal/universe amd64 Packages
Description: real-time performance monitoring (metapackage)
Netdata is distributed, real-time, performance and health monitoring for
systems and applications. It provides insights of everything happening on the
systems it runs using interactive web dashboards.
.
It can run autonomously without any third party components or it can be
integrated to existing monitoring tool chains (Prometheus, Graphite,
OpenTSDB, Kafka, Grafana, etc).
.
This package is a metapackage depending on the typical netdata components.
…and goes back for a few versions, which indicates that the agent at least is F/LOSS and has community support.
Originally Posted by
The Cog
The web site looks professionally produced - makes me wonder if they intend to make the product commercial as soon as they have enough users becoming dependent on them.
They say as much:
(…from their cloud sign-up page)
Manage all of your nodes in one place for free
Netdata Cloud lets you and your team monitor and troubleshoot your entire infrastructure of Netdata nodes. See every metric from every system in real time.
Netdata Cloud is offered completely free of charge with no limits on the number of nodes, metrics or team members.
In the future, we’ll be offering complementary paid services for advanced user control and auditing, increased metadata retention, and enterprise plugins. The best is yet to come.
…so at least they're up front about it.
The fact that their non-standalone solution is a "cloud" solution could leave you very dependent on their servers for continued operation.
Agreed. There's that addiction thing happening. I don't know of a self hosted alternative though.
And there is no mention of opening firewalls to enable the cloud to connect in and retrieve your stats, which makes me wonder if the agent phones home.
Oh, it phones home alright. But they make all sorts of noises about how your data remains locally resident and protected, yada‑yada‑yada. Privacy is one of my primary concerns. I would consider simply using the agent and foregoing long-term analysis, but that seems absurdly self‑limiting and defeats the whole point of the exercise.
The fact that simply looking at their web site caused one Firefox thread to peg at 100% CPU and bring my laptop fans on gives me an uneasy feeling, too.
Probably a result of the animated GIF further down the page. I have noscript on by default and was surprised to see animation which led to my checking it out: it's rather clever actually, but on some machines, animated GIFs will hit the CPU pretty hard.
If you can get good answers to these points, which may just be my paranoia, then I think it looks very interesting and worth trying out.
Well, your paranoia is shared by me. I'm going to sleep on whether I open a cloud account with them. If I do, it will likely be highly anonymized—piped through anonaddy and with fake credentials. Will have to decide if their access to my machine data is sufficiently compromising to pass up on what otherwise looks like a well designed offering.
Thanks for your input!
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