80,789 stars · GPL-3.0-or-later · v2.12.0 (2026-09-30) · Track this in Scout
Draws hundreds of live charts about a single computer with almost no setting up.
▶Repo detailsthe review · specs · pros & cons · install
What it is
Netdata is a program you install on a machine; it finds what is running by itself and starts charting it. The charts appear on a web page served by that same machine, at port 19999.
What it is good for. Anyone who runs a server and only finds out something is wrong when a person complains. Also useful on a home machine that stores family photographs or backups, because the charts make a filling disk or a failing network obvious at a glance.
- One command installs it, and it discovers what to measure without being told.
- The charts update every second, which is far finer than most monitoring tools and makes short spikes visible.
- The project publishes honest sizing figures: "1%-5% of a single core with default settings", "100-200 MB on an empty system" and "250-350 MB in typical production", and about 4 GiB of disk by default.
- The newest release is one the project tells you not to run. The release notes for v2.12.0 of 30 September 2026 say it "has been discovered to have serious stability issues that cause it to crash randomly on startup" and advise using "the latest known working version (v2.11.1)". GitHub still shows v2.12.0 as the latest release, so copying the obvious thing installs the broken one.
- The one-line installer's defaults sign you up for nightly builds, automatic updates and anonymous usage reporting. You have to know to add
--stable-channel --disable-telemetryto avoid all three. - Only the part that runs on the machine is open source. The repository's own notes say the hosted service is proprietary and the web interface itself is closed source, free to use. The licence file is GNU GPL version 3 (a licence that requires anyone distributing a changed copy to publish their changes), and it names no Netdata copyright holder at all — the only copyright line in it belongs to the Free Software Foundation.
- prometheus/prometheus
Collects the same kind of measurements over time and raises alerts, but it stores and queries only, so you add separate collectors and a separate charting tool.
Track this in Scout - zabbix/zabbix
Monitors servers, network equipment and services with alerts and charts, but needs its own database and web server and measures at roughly minute intervals.
Track this in Scout - nicolargo/glances
Shows the same live figures for one machine but mainly in a terminal, with no long-term storage and no alerts.
Track this in Scout
# Needs: a Linux machine with systemd, root access, and outgoing internet. wget -O /tmp/netdata-kickstart.sh https://get.netdata.cloud/kickstart.sh sh /tmp/netdata-kickstart.sh --stable-channel --disable-telemetry
