How to Monitor Linux with Netdata

Netdata is a real-time resource monitoring tool with a friendly web-based interface developed and maintained by FireHQL. Through this tool, you can understand the resource usage of CPU, RAM, hard disk, network, Apache, Postfix and other software and hardware through charts. It is much like other monitoring software such as Nagios; however, Netdata only supports real-time monitoring through the web interface.



Brothers and sisters, let's first understand Netdata.

At present, Netdata has no authentication mechanism. If you are worried that others can obtain relevant information from your computer, you should set firewall rules to restrict access. The UI is simple, so anyone who understands the graphics and understands the results they see, at least you'll be impressed with how quickly it installs.



Its web frontend is responsive and requires no Flash plugin. The UI is clean and maintains the characteristics that Netdata should have. At first glance, you can see a lot of graphs, luckily most of the commonly used graph data (like CPU, RAM, network, and hard disk) are at the top. If you want to drill down into the graphical data, you just need to swipe down the scroll bar, or click on an item in the menu on the right. Netdata also allows you to control the display, reset, and zoom of the graph through the buttons on the bottom right of each graph.



The Netdata chart controls

how much system resources Netdata does not take up, it does not take up more than 40MB of memory. Because this software is written by the author in C language.



Downloading Netdata

To download the software, you can visit Netdata's GitHub page and click the green "Clone or download" button on the left side of the page. You should see the following two options:



Download via ZIP file

One way is to download a ZIP file. It contains everything in the repository. But if the repository is updated, you need to download the ZIP file again. After downloading the ZIP file, you will use the unzip command line tool to unzip the file. Run the following command to extract the contents of the ZIP file to the netdata folder.



$ cd ~/Downloads

$ unzip netdata-master.zip

There is

no need to add the -d option to the unzip command to unzip Netdata, because the files are placed in the root folder of the ZIP file. Without that folder, unzip would unzip everything under the current directory (which would make the files very confusing).



Downloading via Git



Another way is to download the entire repository via git. Of course, your system needs to have git installed. Git is installed by default on Fedora systems. If it is not installed, you can install git from the command line with the following command.



$ sudo dnf install git

After installing git, you need to "clone" the repository to your system. Run the command below.





Installing Netdata

There are some packages that you will need to successfully build Netdata. Fortunately, you can install everything you need with a single command (this is written in its installation documentation). Running the following command at the command line will satisfy all the dependencies required to install Netdata.



$ dnf install zlib-devel libuuid-devellibmnl-devel gcc make git autoconf autogen automake pkgconfig

When all required packages are installed, you cd to the netdata/ directory and run the netdata-installer.sh script.



$ sudo ./netdata-installer.sh

You will then be prompted to press enter to start the installer. If you want to continue, just press enter.



Installation of Netdata

If all goes well, Netdata is installed and running on your system. The install script also adds an uninstaller script called netdata-uninstaller.sh in the corresponding folder. If you don't want to use Netdata in the future, run this script to uninstall Netdata from your system.



You can check its running status with systemctl.



$ sudo systemctl status netdata

Using Netdata



Now that we have Netdata installed and running, you can access the web interface through port 19999. The screenshot below is my Netdata running on a test machine.



An overview of the Netdata runtime

Congratulations ! You have successfully installed and can see beautiful appearance and graphics, as well as advanced statistics of your machine's performance. Whether it's your personal machine or not, you can show off to your friends because you can gain insight into your server performance, and Netdata's performance reports on any machine are excellent.