fecbb89d0c
* Move directories and change verbiage to guide * Move health guides * Quick fix to collectors quickstart * Fix broken links * Remove health/tutorials dir * Fix links in collectors quickstart * Fix links to go.d pages
157 lines
8.7 KiB
Markdown
157 lines
8.7 KiB
Markdown
<!--
|
|
title: "Step 1. Netdata's building blocks"
|
|
custom_edit_url: https://github.com/netdata/netdata/edit/master/docs/guides/step-by-step/step-01.md
|
|
-->
|
|
|
|
# Step 1. Netdata's building blocks
|
|
|
|
Netdata is a distributed and real-time _health monitoring and performance troubleshooting toolkit_ for monitoring your
|
|
systems and applications.
|
|
|
|
Because the monitoring agent is highly-optimized, you can install it all your physical systems, containers, IoT devices,
|
|
and edge devices without disrupting their core function.
|
|
|
|
By default, and without configuration, Netdata delivers real-time insights into everything happening on the system, from
|
|
CPU utilization to packet loss on every network device. Netdata can also auto-detect metrics from hundreds of your
|
|
favorite services and applications, like MySQL/MariaDB, Docker, Nginx, Apache, MongoDB, and more.
|
|
|
|
All metrics are automatically-updated, providing interactive dashboards that allow you to dive in, discover anomalies,
|
|
and figure out the root cause analysis of any issue.
|
|
|
|
Best of all, Netdata is entirely free, open-source software! Solo developers and enterprises with thousands of systems
|
|
can both use it free of charge. We're hosted on [GitHub](https://github.com/netdata/netdata).
|
|
|
|
Want to learn about the history of Netdata, and what inspired our CEO to build it in the first place, and where we're
|
|
headed? Read Costa's comprehensive blog post: _[Redefining monitoring with Netdata (and how it came to
|
|
be)](https://blog.netdata.cloud/posts/redefining-monitoring-netdata/)_.
|
|
|
|
## What you'll learn in this step
|
|
|
|
In the first step of the Netdata guide, you'll learn about:
|
|
|
|
- [Netdata's core features](#netdatas-core-features)
|
|
- [Why you should use Netdata](#why-you-should-use-netdata)
|
|
- [How Netdata has complementary systems, not competitors](#how-netdata-has-complementary-systems-not-competitors)
|
|
|
|
Let's get started!
|
|
|
|
## Netdata's core features
|
|
|
|
Netdata has only been around for a few years, but it's a complex piece of software. Here are just some of the features
|
|
we'll cover throughout this guide.
|
|
|
|
- A sophisticated **dashboard**, which we'll cover in [step 2](step-02.md). The real-time, highly-granular dashboard,
|
|
with hundreds of charts, is your main source of information about the health and performance of your systems/
|
|
applications. We designed the dashboard with anomaly detection and quick analysis in mind. We'll return to
|
|
dashboard-related topics in both [step 7](step-07.md) and [step 8](step-08.md).
|
|
- **Long-term metrics storage** by default. With our new database engine, you can store days, weeks, or months of
|
|
per-second historical metrics. Or you can archive metrics to another database, like MongoDB or Prometheus. We'll
|
|
cover all these options in [step 9](step-09.md).
|
|
- **No configuration necessary**. Without any configuration, you'll get thousands of real-time metrics and hundreds of
|
|
alarms designed by our community of sysadmin experts. But you _can_ configure Netdata in a lot of ways, some of
|
|
which we'll cover in [step 4](step-04.md).
|
|
- **Distributed, per-system installation**. Instead of centralizing metrics in one location, you install Netdata on
|
|
_every_ system, and each system is responsible for its metrics. Having distributed agents reduces cost and lets
|
|
Netdata run on devices with little available resources, such as IoT and edge devices, without affecting their core
|
|
purpose.
|
|
- **Sophisticated health monitoring** to ensure you always know when an anomaly hits. In [step 5](step-05.md), we dive
|
|
into how you can tune alarms, write your own alarm, and enable two types of notifications.
|
|
- **High-speed, low-resource collectors** that allow you to collect thousands of metrics every second while using only
|
|
a fraction of your system's CPU resources and a few MiB of RAM.
|
|
- **Netdata Cloud** is our SaaS toolkit that helps Netdata users monitor the health and performance of entire
|
|
infrastructures, whether they are two or two thousand (or more!) systems. We'll cover Netdata Cloud in [step
|
|
3](step-03.md).
|
|
|
|
## Why you should use Netdata
|
|
|
|
Because you care about the health and performance of your systems and applications, and all of the awesome features we
|
|
just mentioned. And it's free!
|
|
|
|
All these may be valid reasons, but let's step back and talk about Netdata's _principles_ for health monitoring and
|
|
performance troubleshooting. We have a lot of [complementary
|
|
systems](#how-netdata-has-complementary-systems-not-competitors), and we think there's a good reason why Netdata should
|
|
always be your first choice when troubleshooting an anomaly.
|
|
|
|
We built Netdata on four principles.
|
|
|
|
### Per-second data collection
|
|
|
|
Our first principle is per-second data collection for all metrics.
|
|
|
|
That matters because you can't monitor a 2-second service-level agreement (SLA) with 10-second metrics. You can't detect
|
|
quick anomalies if your metrics don't show them.
|
|
|
|
How do we solve this? By decentralizing monitoring. Each node is responsible for collecting metrics, triggering alarms,
|
|
and building dashboards locally, and we work hard to ensure it does each step (and others) with remarkable efficiency.
|
|
For example, Netdata can [collect 100,000 metrics](https://github.com/netdata/netdata/issues/1323) every second while
|
|
using only 9% of a single server-grade CPU core!
|
|
|
|
By decentralizing monitoring and emphasizing speed at every turn, Netdata helps you scale your health monitoring and
|
|
performance troubleshooting to an infrastructure of every size. _And_ you get to keep per-second metrics in long-term
|
|
storage thanks to the database engine.
|
|
|
|
### Unlimited metrics
|
|
|
|
We believe all metrics are fundamentally important, and all metrics should be available to the user.
|
|
|
|
If you don't collect _all_ the metrics a system creates, you're only seeing part of the story. It's like saying you've
|
|
read a book after skipping all but the last ten pages. You only know the ending, not everything that leads to it.
|
|
|
|
Most monitoring solutions exist to poke you when there's a problem, and then tell you to use a dozen different console
|
|
tools to find the root cause. Netdata prefers to give you every piece of information you might need to understand why an
|
|
anomaly happened.
|
|
|
|
### Meaningful presentation
|
|
|
|
We want every piece of Netdata's dashboard not only to look good and update every second, but also provide context as to
|
|
what you're looking at and why it matters.
|
|
|
|
The principle of meaningful presentation is fundamental to our dashboard's user experience (UX). We could have put
|
|
charts in a grid or hidden some behind tabs or buttons. We instead chose to stack them vertically, on a single page, so
|
|
you can visually see how, for example, a jump in disk usage can also increase system load.
|
|
|
|
Here's an example of a system undergoing a disk stress test:
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
> For the curious, here's the command: `stress-ng --fallocate 4 --fallocate-bytes 4g --timeout 1m --metrics --verify
|
|
> --times`!
|
|
|
|
### Immediate results
|
|
|
|
Finally, Netdata should be usable from the moment you install it.
|
|
|
|
As we've talked about, and as you'll learn in the following nine steps, Netdata comes installed with:
|
|
|
|
- Auto-detected metrics
|
|
- Human-readable units
|
|
- Metrics that are structured into charts, families, and contexts
|
|
- Automatically generated dashboards
|
|
- Charts designed for visual anomaly detection
|
|
- Hundreds of pre-configured alarms
|
|
|
|
By standardizing your monitoring infrastructure, Netdata tries to make at least one part of your administrative tasks
|
|
easy!
|
|
|
|
## How Netdata has complementary systems, not competitors
|
|
|
|
We'll cover this quickly, as you're probably eager to get on with using Netdata itself.
|
|
|
|
We don't want to lock you in to using Netdata by itself, and forever. By supporting [archiving to
|
|
external databases](/exporting/README.md) like Graphite, Prometheus, OpenTSDB, MongoDB, and others, you can use Netdata _in
|
|
conjunction_ with software that might seem like our competitors.
|
|
|
|
We don't want to "wage war" with another monitoring solution, whether it's commercial, open-source, or anything in
|
|
between. We just want to give you all the metrics every second, and what you do with them next is your business, not
|
|
ours. Our mission is helping people create more extraordinary infrastructures!
|
|
|
|
## What's next?
|
|
|
|
We think it's imperative you understand why we built Netdata the way we did. But now that we have that behind us, let's
|
|
get right into that dashboard you've heard so much about.
|
|
|
|
[Next: Get to know Netdata's dashboard →](step-02.md)
|
|
|
|
[](<>)
|