When I first started the project that became the Netdata Agent, I was trying to solve a painful, real-world problem: IT infrastructure monitoring tools fell short when it came to providing complete, granular metrics in real time. Believe me, I had no shortage of tools to choose from, but each of them lacked something either in the ability to see every metric I needed, or see it at the frequency required.

Netdata Cloud works differently from other monitoring solutions. Most solutions limit the number and frequency of metrics because they rely on architectures that aggregate data. Netdata Cloud, however, streams limited metadata from each node running the Netdata Agent, keeping you in control of the data on your systems. The advantage of this architecture is that there is no limit to the number or frequency of metrics, regardless of the scale or complexity of your IT infrastructure.

Sysadmin Day 2020 is right around the corner and we’d like to show our appreciation for all the sysadmins out there who keep IT humming along and come to the rescue to resolve critical issues day in and day out. This year, we’re celebrating all week long by hosting an IT Heroes and Homelabs contest. Join the celebration by retweeting our post with the hashtag #SysadminDay #NetdataWin, and we’ll enter you in a drawing to win some Netdata swag!

In 2019, the Netdata team already knew that a Netdata Cloud solution in the form of an online platform would greatly complement Netdata’s distributed monitoring by making it much easier to organize large infrastructures and by enabling new ways for teams to collaborate. The old node registry available at the time wasn’t enough for Netdata’s users. Building an online platform, even one that does not directly process users’ metrics, is challenging.