Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

October 2023

Netdata vs Prometheus: Performance Analysis

In an era dominated by data-driven decision making, monitoring tools play an indispensable role in ensuring that our systems run efficiently and without interruption. When considering tools like Netdata and Prometheus, performance isn't just a number; it's about empowering users with real-time insights and enabling them to act with agility.

Monitoring vs Observability: What Engineers Need to Know

As systems increasingly shift towards distributed architectures to deliver application services, the roles of monitoring and observability have never been more crucial. Monitoring delivers the situational awareness you need to detect issues, while observability goes a step further, offering the analytical depth to understand the root cause of those issues. Understanding the nuanced differences between monitoring and observability is crucial for anyone responsible for system health and performance.

Monitoring systemd logs with Netdata using the systemd journal Function

The systemd journal plugin by Netdata makes viewing, exploring and analyzing systemd journal logs simple and efficient. It automatically discovers available journal sources, allows advanced filtering, offers interactive visual representations and supports exploring the logs of both individual servers and the logs on infrastructure wide journal centralization servers.

Exploring systemd journal logs with Netdata

Today, we released our systemd journal plugin for Netdata, allowing you to explore, view, search, filter and analyze systemd journal logs. Like most things about Netdata, this is a zero-configuration plugin. You don’t have to do anything apart from installing Netdata on your systems.This is key design direction for Netdata, since we want Netdata to be able to help even if you install it mid-crisis, while you have an incident at hand.

systemd journal logs: A Game-Changer for DevOps and Developers

“Why bother with it? I let it run in the background and focus on more important DevOps work.”— a random DevOps Engineer at Reddit r/devops In an era where technology is evolving at breakneck speeds, it's easy to overlook the tools that are right under our noses. One such underutilized powerhouse is the systemd journal. For many, it's a mere tool to check the status of systemd service units or to tail the most recent events (journalctl -f).