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Thread: Seeking advice on Netdata

  1. #1
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    Seeking advice on Netdata

    Due to some recent server crashes, I'm looking at installing Netdata to track system variables/health. Does anyone have experience with this package? I'm primarily interested in the following:

    1. How useful is it really?
    2. Does it increase attack surface and, if so, by how much? Anything to worry about?
    3. Is there a large impact on system resources?

    Additional comments/observations are also very welcome.

  2. #2
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    Re: Seeking advice on Netdata

    I had not heard of Netdata, so I had a look at their web site. It looks very slick and impressive. The screenshots look like grafana dashboards to me, no surprises there.
    The claims of automatic per-second recording of so many variables are impressive. It sounds like a good quick way to hit the ground running.

    But I have reservations, possibly unfounded.
    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. The fact that their non-standalone solution is a "cloud" solution could leave you very dependent on their servers for continued operation. 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.
    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.

    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.

  3. #3
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    Re: Seeking advice on Netdata

    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.

    Quote Originally Posted by The Cog View Post
    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!

  4. #4
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    Re: Seeking advice on Netdata

    I have no knowledge of NetData.

    I list these tools I have found through experiments.

    https://www.grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2

    And you might find that lynis is already installed.

    You need to run in sudo ..

    sudo lynis show

    this shows the options.

    [P.S.] There is also Stacer for Linux monitoring.

    [P.P.S.] and having studied more about NextCloud I see that the above tools may not be of much use to you .. only for desktop.
    Last edited by dragonfly41; February 14th, 2021 at 05:07 PM.

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    Re: Seeking advice on Netdata

    How is netdata different from, for example netsnmp, openSNMP or Zabbix:

    NetSNMP is the underlying system.
    OpenSNMP is very compute intensive but it can handle a very large deployment. (I used it and it worked, but I changed to Zabbix)
    Zabbix is light weight and scales to medium size deployments (I used it and it worked very well with about 3000 servers, plus about 10,000 modems and WiFi access points)
    Last edited by HermanAB; February 14th, 2021 at 05:04 PM.

  6. #6
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    Re: Seeking advice on Netdata

    Quote Originally Posted by dragonfly41 View Post
    …you might find that lynis is already installed.
    …[P.S.] There is also Stacer for Linux monitoring.
    [P.P.S.] …I see that the above tools may not be of much use to you .. only for desktop.
    Nonetheless, thanks for the suggestions. They may be useful in a capacity other than server monitoring, so are still helpful. I'm afraid, however, that they won't fulfill my immediate aim of monitoring ZFS.
    Quote Originally Posted by HermanAB View Post
    How is netdata different from, for example netsnmp, openSNMP or Zabbix:

    NetSNMP is the underlying system.
    OpenSNMP is very compute intensive but it can handle a very large deployment. (I used it and it worked, but I changed to Zabbix)
    Zabbix is light weight and scales to medium size deployments (I used it and it worked very well with about 3000 servers, plus about 10,000 modems and WiFi access points)
    I've always shied away from enterprise‑level platforms like SNMP because my impression of them is that they:
    1. are resource‑heavy
    2. have a steep learning curve
    3. are ornery to implement, configure and maintain
    4. increase attack surface

    Please forgive my ignorance, but I'm just beginning to dip my toes into the whole sysadmin world. When you consider 3000 servers to be a "medium size deployment", then not only am I not in your league, I'm not even playing the same game. I'm looking for a quick and dirty solution to a five server SOHO that will require minimal supervision from me and won't be too taxing on my aging grey matter. I've already peered into Webmin (yes, notwithstanding their atrocious supply chain poisoning fiasco a couple of years ago) precisely because I value a dummy‑friendly summary of system health/resource usage.

    Netdata appeals because it is ludicrously easy to implement. The downside is the reporting back to mothership, which I need to think hard about. Were it not for this, it would be a no‑brainer.

    Don't get me wrong: I am open to all options. SNMP would allow me to also manage my printers, which is not really that big a deal, but would admittedly be a nice‑to‑have. I know nothing about Zabbix, but it sounds complicated.

    With Netdata, all I had to do was:
    Code:
    sudo apt install netdata
    …and, presto, it was done. There is tremendous value in simplicity to simpletons like me.

  7. #7
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    Re: Seeking advice on Netdata

    You may find a reasonable answer by installing prometheus (stats gathering database) and grafana (displays dashboards based on data collected by prometheus) on a server, and installing prometheus node exporter on all your servers. The node exporter collects stats on the sever it runs on and exposes them in an http server. Prometheus can be configured with a list of servers (running node exported) to collect stats from. Grafana is a web server that offers dashboard views of the data inside prometheus.
    - Node Exporter: agent running on all servers, web api allows querying those stats
    - Prometheus: database and periodic querying of the exporters to get the stats
    - Grafana - web based dashboards showing stats stored by prometheus.
    Basic setup is quite straightforward, and making your own dashboards only takes a day or so to get your head round.

    The above is not quite as slick as out-of-the-box netdata judging by what I have seen, but it may well be enough for you. All these 3 are in the repos, and I don't believe they phone home. I ran prometheus and grafana on a raspberry pi for my home PCs for a while, until the pi died. I haven't got round to replicating on the replacement pi.

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    Re: Seeking advice on Netdata

    BTW, Zabbix will work fine with five machines also. It is very low intensity (that is why it can handle thousands of devices without stress) and quite trivial to set up.

    OpenSNMP however, is a beast and best avoided.

  9. #9
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    Re: Seeking advice on Netdata

    Quote Originally Posted by The Cog View Post
    You may find a reasonable answer by installing prometheus (stats gathering database) and grafana (displays dashboards based on data collected by prometheus) on a server, and installing prometheus node exporter on all your servers…Basic setup is quite straightforward, and making your own dashboards only takes a day or so to get your head round.
    Many thanks for this!

    An alternative that I am more than willing to try. And being retired and all (and with the pandemic raging), what else have I but time?

    I'll research a bit first to see if it's within my capabilities.

    I might still forge on with Netdata too. In some ways, it may be instructive to compare the two. If I find the motivation and mental resources, I may even add SNMP to the mix—okay, that may be biting off more than I can chew.

  10. #10
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    Re: Seeking advice on Netdata

    Quote Originally Posted by HermanAB View Post
    BTW, Zabbix will work fine with five machines also. It is very low intensity (that is why it can handle thousands of devices without stress) and quite trivial to set up.
    Intriguing. Have you any links to favourite tutorials? I can easily do a websearch but they are not all of good quality.
    OpenSNMP however, is a beast and best avoided.
    Appreciate this heads-up. Always happy to defer to greater wisdom.

    ADDENDUM

    Just visited the Zabbix site. Awesome. F/LOSS too, which I wasn't expecting. I wonder why it's not in the repos? Anyways, I never realized there was such a wealth of monitoring/admin products out there. It's embarrassing how cloistered and uninformed I've been. Have fallen so far behind over the years. And, in combination with my recent Nextcloud journey, it's humbling how much time and dedication some have put into resources that benefit the greater community.

    Further ADDENDUM

    Hah! There's a snap for Zabbix. @HermanAB: Would you recommend it? Snaps have certain drawbacks, but it would be easier to install than in isolation from their site.
    Last edited by DuckHook; February 15th, 2021 at 02:06 AM. Reason: Additional comments

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