Netdata

Netdata is an open-source, real-time infrastructure monitoring platform that has rapidly become one of the most popular observability tools in the world, with over 70,000 stars on GitHub. Founded in 2013 and headquartered in London, United Kingdom, Netdata was designed from the ground up to solve a fundamental problem in infrastructure monitoring: providing instant, per-second visibility into every aspect of your systems without complex configuration, heavy resource usage, or prohibitive costs.

For European organizations looking for an alternative to US-based monitoring giants like Datadog, New Relic, or Grafana Cloud, Netdata offers a compelling combination of open-source transparency, real-time performance, and a European-based company. Its agent-based architecture means you can monitor your infrastructure entirely on your own servers, keeping all telemetry data within your own environment and under your complete control.

Real-Time Per-Second Monitoring

The defining characteristic of Netdata is its per-second granularity. While most monitoring tools collect metrics at 15-second, 30-second, or even 60-second intervals, Netdata captures data every single second by default. This level of granularity is critical for detecting brief performance spikes, identifying intermittent issues, and understanding the true behavior of your systems under load. A brief CPU spike that lasts only a few seconds, for example, would be invisible to a tool collecting at 30-second intervals but immediately apparent in Netdata.

Despite this high-resolution data collection, Netdata is designed to be exceptionally lightweight. The agent typically uses less than 1% CPU and a few hundred megabytes of RAM on modern hardware, making it suitable for deployment on production servers without impacting application performance. This efficiency is achieved through a custom-built database engine and optimized data collection routines written primarily in C.

Zero-Configuration Auto-Discovery

One of Netdata's most praised features is its ability to automatically discover and monitor virtually everything running on a server without manual configuration. Upon installation, Netdata immediately detects the operating system, hardware, running services, containers, virtual machines, and applications, and begins collecting relevant metrics. It supports over 800 integrations out of the box, covering databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB), web servers (Nginx, Apache), containers (Docker, Kubernetes), cloud services, network devices, and much more.

This zero-configuration approach dramatically reduces the time to value compared to tools like Prometheus, which require manual configuration of scrape targets and exporters. A fresh Netdata installation can go from zero to full monitoring in minutes, with thousands of metrics being collected and visualized without any manual setup. For DevOps teams managing large, dynamic environments, this automatic discovery is particularly valuable as new services are deployed and removed frequently.

ML-Powered Anomaly Detection

Netdata incorporates machine learning directly into its monitoring agent to provide automated anomaly detection. Each metric collected by Netdata is continuously analyzed by an ML model that learns normal patterns and flags deviations in real time. This means that instead of setting static thresholds for every metric (which is time-consuming and often inaccurate), Netdata can automatically detect unusual behavior such as a gradual memory leak, an unexpected change in request patterns, or a disk I/O anomaly.

The anomaly detection runs locally on each agent, so it does not require sending your data to external cloud services for processing. This edge-computing approach to ML means that anomaly detection works even for self-hosted deployments without any cloud connectivity, which is important for organizations with strict data residency requirements. The ML models continuously adapt to your specific infrastructure patterns, reducing false positives over time.

AI-Powered Troubleshooting

Building on its ML capabilities, Netdata has introduced AI-powered troubleshooting that goes beyond simple anomaly detection. When an issue is detected, the AI assistant can automatically correlate related metrics across your infrastructure to identify the probable root cause, estimate the blast radius of the issue, and generate a summary report. This dramatically reduces the mean time to resolution (MTTR) for infrastructure incidents, especially for teams that may not have deep expertise in every component of their stack.

The AI troubleshooting features are available through the Netdata Cloud dashboard, where they can analyze data aggregated from multiple Netdata agents across your infrastructure. For organizations that prefer to keep everything self-hosted, the local agent still provides anomaly detection and correlation capabilities, though the more advanced AI features are part of the cloud offering.

Dashboard and Visualization

Netdata comes with a built-in, high-performance dashboard that visualizes all collected metrics in real time. The dashboard is web-based and accessible from any browser, with no additional software required. Charts update every second, providing a live view of your infrastructure's behavior. The interface is organized into logical sections covering system overview, CPU, memory, disk, network, applications, and each monitored service, making it easy to navigate even when thousands of metrics are being collected.

The dashboard supports interactive features including zooming, panning, highlighting, and comparison across time ranges. You can also create custom dashboards with specific charts and layouts tailored to your monitoring needs. For teams that already use Grafana, Netdata provides a native Grafana data source plugin, allowing you to query Netdata metrics directly from your existing Grafana dashboards.

Distributed Architecture and Scalability

Netdata uses a distributed architecture where lightweight agents run on each monitored node, collecting and storing metrics locally. For centralized visibility, agents can stream their data to Parent nodes, which aggregate metrics from multiple agents into a unified view. This hub-and-spoke model allows Netdata to scale from monitoring a single server to managing thousands of nodes across multiple data centers and cloud environments.

The Netdata Cloud service provides an additional layer of centralization, offering a single pane of glass across all your agents and parents without requiring you to send raw metrics to the cloud. Instead, Netdata Cloud queries your agents on demand, which means your data stays on your infrastructure while you still get the benefits of a centralized dashboard, alerting, and management interface.

Alerting and Notifications

Netdata includes a powerful alerting system with hundreds of pre-configured alerts that activate automatically based on the services detected on your systems. These alerts cover common failure scenarios such as high CPU usage, low disk space, service crashes, and network anomalies. Alerts can be customized, silenced, or extended with custom alert definitions written in a simple configuration format.

Notifications can be sent through a wide range of channels including email, Slack, Discord, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Microsoft Teams, Telegram, and webhooks. The alerting system supports escalation policies, quiet hours, and per-alert notification routing, giving teams fine-grained control over how and when they are notified about infrastructure issues.

Open Source and Licensing

The Netdata Agent is released under the GPLv3+ license and is completely free to use on unlimited nodes. There are no artificial limitations on the number of metrics, retention period, or number of users. The source code is publicly available on GitHub, where it has one of the largest and most active communities in the monitoring space. This open-source foundation means you can audit the code, contribute improvements, and be confident that there are no hidden data collection or telemetry mechanisms.

Netdata Cloud offers additional features on top of the open-source agent, including centralized alerting management, role-based access control, and the AI-powered features mentioned earlier. The cloud service has a free tier for up to 5 nodes, with paid plans starting at $12 per node per month for larger deployments. This hybrid model allows teams to start entirely open-source and self-hosted, and optionally adopt cloud features as their needs grow.

GDPR Compliance and Data Privacy

Netdata is designed with data privacy in mind. The self-hosted agent keeps all monitoring data on your own infrastructure, giving you complete control over where it is stored and who can access it. For organizations using Netdata Cloud, the platform is designed to minimize data transfer, querying agents on demand rather than continuously ingesting raw metrics. The company operates under UK and European data protection regulations and provides Data Processing Agreements for cloud customers.

Limitations and Considerations

While Netdata excels at real-time infrastructure monitoring, there are some limitations to consider. The platform is primarily focused on metrics and has only recently added log handling capabilities (indexing logs at the edge), so organizations that need unified log management may still need a complementary tool. Netdata also lacks native distributed tracing support, which is important for microservices architectures. On very large deployments with hundreds of servers, the per-second data collection can generate significant network traffic when streaming to parent nodes, requiring careful architecture planning.

Who Should Use Netdata

Netdata is an excellent choice for DevOps teams, system administrators, SREs, and developers who need real-time visibility into their infrastructure. It is particularly well-suited for organizations that value open source, want to avoid vendor lock-in, or have strict data residency requirements that preclude sending monitoring data to US-based cloud services. Startups and small teams will appreciate the zero-configuration setup and generous free tier, while larger enterprises can leverage the distributed architecture and cloud features for centralized management. Anyone currently using Datadog, Grafana Cloud, or Prometheus will find Netdata a capable European alternative that emphasizes simplicity and real-time performance.