@scottalanmiller it is a completely different purpose. With all other monitoring solutions you get "statistics of past performance" and that's it.

With netdata you get real-time insights of everything happening in the system and its applications. And when I say everything I really mean it: everything.

My goal was not to design a prettier munin, nagios, zabbix, smokeping, etc. There are very nice tools (I really like them), but they completely fail to provide the right information.

Check for example this: https://github.com/firehol/netdata/wiki/Linux-console-tools%2C-fail-to-report-per-process-CPU-usage-properly - even top fails to properly report what is really happening in all cases.

So, netdata is a real-time performance monitoring system, similar to top, vmstat, iotop, systemd-cgtop, etc. Even if you need statistics of past performance, netdata can archive its metrics to graphite, opentstb, prometheus and the likes, so that you can visualize them with grafana (another excellent tool).

netdata and prometheus are quite different. They can actually cooperate: netdata exposes all its metrics in a prometheus compatible format, so that prometheus can use netdata as a data collector.

In general, prometheus is a time-series database with an embedded scraper. For sources it cannot scrape itself it uses other data collectors (including netdata).

netdata is a real-time performance monitoring. The detail and amount of information netdata provides is probably too much for prometheus. Also netdata is distributed (you install it everywhere), while prometheus is centralized.

There is no good and bad in these things. Different things for different needs.

So, use the solution that suits you best...

@scottalanmiller your browser does all the magic, not the servers. Each netdata is completely isolated to the rest. Only you (your browser) needs to have access to all of them. How you do this, it is your problem to figure out. You can use an authentication web server in proxy mode, setup a VPN, trust your static IP at firewall, tunnel it through ssh, etc

All these are your option. To understand the concept, let's assume netdata is a CGI. What would you do? Do the same.

@scottalanmiller it is a completely different purpose. With all other monitoring solutions you get "statistics of past performance" and that's it.

With netdata you get real-time insights of everything happening in the system and its applications. And when I say everything I really mean it: everything.

My goal was not to design a prettier munin, nagios, zabbix, smokeping, etc. There are very nice tools (I really like them), but they completely fail to provide the right information.

Check for example this: https://github.com/firehol/netdata/wiki/Linux-console-tools%2C-fail-to-report-per-process-CPU-usage-properly - even top fails to properly report what is really happening in all cases.

So, netdata is a real-time performance monitoring system, similar to top, vmstat, iotop, systemd-cgtop, etc. Even if you need statistics of past performance, netdata can archive its metrics to graphite, opentstb, prometheus and the likes, so that you can visualize them with grafana (another excellent tool).

@scottalanmiller if you need authentication you can run it behind another web server, like nginx or apache.

@hobbit666 there is no multi-server overview. It is a real-time performance monitoring tool. Its purpose is to provide over the web real-time information about the metrics of each server. It is not a statistics tool.

@hobbit666 you install it everywhere - it is a "smarter" agent.