Linux: Deploy the Netdata Server Performance Monitor

If you’re looking to deploy a server performance monitor for your Linux servers, Netdata has a great option that is easy to install, offers a very well-designed web-based interface, and monitors things like CPU, load, disks, RAM, swap, network, processes, idle-jitter, interrupts, softirqs, softnet, entropy, uptime, clock sync, Ipc semaphores, and lpc shared memory.

The Netdata platform also includes 800+ plugins and integrations for things like containers and applications, all of which conform to open standards.

Netdata allows you to also connect as many nodes as needed to your instance, so you can keep tabs on all of your servers from one handy location.

I’m going to walk you through the process of installing Netdata on Ubuntu Server 22.04 and then adding an additional Linux node. Don’t worry, Linux is NOT the only supported node OS. You can add Windows, Docker, Kubernetes (HELM), macOS, and FreeBSD nodes as well.

First things first… the installation of Netdata.

What You’ll Need

To get Netdata up and running, you’ll need a running instance of Ubuntu Server 22.04 (or newer). You’ll also need a user with sudo privileges. As far as adding nodes, you can use whatever OS you like but I’ll demonstrate with a second Ubuntu node. It should also be noted that you can deploy Netdata on any flavor of Linux as well as MacOS.

Update and Upgrade

Before you install Netdata, you’ll want to update and upgrade your Ubuntu server. To do that, log into your Ubuntu Server instance and first run the update with:

sudo apt-get update

Once that completes, issue the following command for the upgrade:

sudo apt-get upgrade

Keep in mind that if the kernel gets upgraded in the process, the changes won’t take effect until you reboot the server, so make sure to do this at a time when the server isn’t needed. Of course, you could always install Netdata on a fresh instance of Linux and then connect the necessary nodes to it, without having to worry about adding yet another service to a production machine.

Once you’ve completed the update/upgrade process, it’s time to install.

Installing Netdata

The company behind Netdata has created an easy-to-use kickstart script. To use this script, you’ll need to first download it with wget. If wget isn’t already installed on your server, install it with:

sudo apt-get install wget -y

Download the kickstart script with the command:

wget https://my-netdata.io/kickstart.sh

With that file saved, run it with the following sudo command:

sudo sh kickstart.sh

You will have to okay the installation by typing y at a couple of instances during the installation (so pay attention to the output).

When the instance completes, the Netdata service will automatically start but you’ll want to go ahead and enable it, so that it will automatically start at boot time. To do this, issue the command:

sudo systemtl enable netdata

Accessing Netdata

With all of this taken care of, open a web browser that’s on the same network as the hosting server and point it to http://SERVER:19999 (where SERVER is the IP address of the hosting server). If you need to access Netdata from outside of your LAN, you’ll need to use a domain and have your router setup to point the domain to the hosting server.

You’ll be greeted by the Netdata dashboard. Click Sign in and you’ll be directed to a page where you can create a Netdata account (Figure 1).

You can create an account via email or with a Google account. Once you’ve done that, you’ll be presented with a command to run on the hosting server. That command is:

sudo cat /var/lib/netdata/netdata_random_session_id

When you run the above command, it’ll generate a random ID. You must then paste that ID into the Netdata page. Once you’ve done that, your server will be connected to your Netdata cloud account.

Adding a Node

You can now add nodes to Netdata. To do that, click the Nodes tab and then click Add Nodes (Figure 2).

After clicking Add Nodes, a sidebar will pop out, giving you access to the necessary commands for adding Linux, Windows, Docker, Kubernetes, macOS, and FreeBSD nodes (Figure 3).

Once the node is added, it’ll take a bit of time before it appears on the dashboard and data starts to collect.

Remember, any time you need to go back to your Netdata dashboard, point a browser to http://SERVER:19999, log in with your account, and you can then access the information for all of your nodes.

And that’s all there is to deploying the Netdata monitor. Do note that this is for the free version of the monitor. From within the dashboard, you can also upgrade to the business plan by clicking Upgrade Now. The business plan runs $4.50/month/node and gives you unlimited metrics and logs, unlimited nodes, unlimited custom dashboards, and more. To find out more about the Business plan, check out the price matrix that also includes the Enterprise on-premise plan.