Open source and community have always been in the DNA of Netdata, with the Agent starting as a very popular open-source project. Since then, a lot has changed, with Netdata maturing into a company, and the Netdata Agent finding its place as an open-source project in a wider offering that redesigns the monitoring experience from the ground up.
In software development, it’s important to have a team dedicated to ensuring all systems and applications maintain maximum performance and uptime. Establishing processes that limit system and application slowdowns and outages while expediting the product release process is often done through a developer operations team, also known as dev ops or DevOps.
Netdata is zero-configuration monitoring. It’s a principle that we’ve stood behind since the project’s beginning, when it was only our CEO Costa trying to solve a “painful, real-world problem,” and it’s one we stand by today. Our insistence on zero-configuration guides every product decision we make, every grooming process, and every React component our frontend teams design.
On our journey to democratize monitoring, we are proud to have open source at the core of both our products and our company values. What started as a project out of frustration for lack of existing alternatives (see anger-driven development), quickly became one of the most starred open-source projects on all of GitHub.
Let’s talk through a scenario: You have a Linux-based VM running on DigitalOcean (aka a Droplet), and you install Netdata on it using our recommended kickstart script. As the installation process winds down, the Droplet starts up the Netdata Agent’s web server and serves the local Agent web dashboard on port 19999.
The Netdata Agent is well-equipped to solve monitoring and troubleshooting challenges for single nodes. We love that the Agent is so valuable to our users, but Netdata Cloud is designed for infrastructure monitoring. That’s why we’re working so hard to offer even more capabilities and help users monitor and troubleshoot infrastructures of all sizes, entirely for free!
The perception that Netdata is only capable of short-term metrics storage is a myth. It’s a pervasive myth we still see in blog posts and through community engagement, despite it being false for more than a year. However, like all myths, this one on metrics storage began with a kernel of truth. When Netdata first flourished as an open-source project in 2017 and 2018, the default metrics database was RAM-only.
Whether you’re a site reliability engineer (SRE), DevOps engineer, or any other role that plays a part in maintaining uptime for your company’s infrastructure, it’s critical to have visibility into all of your systems, regardless of their operating system. This includes monitoring Windows systems, which is a popular use case for Netdata’s community. Here’s the caveat: Netdata has no native Windows monitoring agent.
As with most commercial products, software today is mass produced for reasons of simple economics. But making the same software work for as many people as possible while also meeting the unique requirements different people and organizations have is a challenging task.
I’m excited to announce an extension to Netdata’s series A funding in the amount of $14.2M, bringing the total amount of funding to $31M. We’re thrilled to share the news; the additional funding will help us continue building the future of health monitoring and performance troubleshooting. In case you missed it, our mission is to redefine infrastructure monitoring. Our unique approach to building the right solution with and for the community is no easy task.
