Netdata, a popular monitoring system, has released version v1.44.0 with several exciting new features and improvements. This release further solidifies Netdata’s position as a leading monitoring solution for servers, Linux, DevOps, and home labs.

One of the major highlights of this release is the significant improvement in performance, surpassing even Prometheus, a well-known monitoring system. Netdata now includes a new streaming protocol called SLOTS, which allows for more efficient metric streaming between children and parents. This reduces overhead on parents by about 30% without impacting the children. Additionally, Netdata now supports multiple compression algorithms, including ZSTD, GZIP, and BROTLI, with ZSTD being the default choice for its balance between compression ratio and CPU consumption.

Another major addition is the introduction of Gorilla compression, a time series data compression technique developed by Facebook for their time series database. When enabled, Gorilla compression provides a 30% reduction in memory usage for Netdata, making it even more efficient compared to Prometheus.

Netdata now also has improved support for handling large systemd-journal databases, making it more capable of dealing with huge log volumes. The systemd-journal.plugin has been optimized for performance in such environments, providing prompt responses to queries. Netdata’s logs have also been rewritten to log to the systemd-journal, allowing for easy monitoring and analysis using Netdata’s systemd-journal.plugin user interface.

A new utility called log2journal has been introduced in beta, allowing the conversion of log files into structured systemd-journal log entries. This powerful tool supports processing various log formats, including JSON and logfmt logs, and can be used to extract, convert, transform, and send logs to systemd-journal.

Netdata has also expanded its range of functions, offering new ways to visualize and troubleshoot system metrics. These functions leverage the wide range of collectors and metrics available in Netdata, providing insights into disk I/O activity, resource utilization of containers and virtual machines, IPMI sensor readings, disk usage for mount points, network traffic, process resource usage, and more.

In addition to these feature enhancements, Netdata has added new alert notification integrations to Netdata Cloud, including Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) and Telegram. These integrations provide users with more options for receiving alert notifications from Netdata.

It’s worth noting that some changes have been made in this release, including the removal of the charts.d/nut collector, which has been replaced by go.d/upsd. Netdata’s internal metrics are now disabled by default to reduce data volume, and Gorilla compression will be enabled by default in the next release. Some exporters, such as Google Cloud Pub Sub and AWS Kinesis, will be removed in the next release, and database modes map and save will also be eliminated. Furthermore, per-core CPU metrics will be disabled by default to improve performance, and several eBPF.plugin modules have been disabled to optimize system performance.

Overall, Netdata’s v1.44.0 release brings significant improvements in performance, log handling, compression, and functionality, making it an even more powerful and efficient monitoring system for servers, Linux, DevOps, and home labs.

For more details and to download the latest release, visit the Netdata GitHub page.

Netdata has released version v1.43.0, which is the most robust and reliable version of Netdata yet. This release includes several improvements and new features that enhance the performance and functionality of Netdata.

One of the major improvements in this release is the enhancement of the systemd-journal logs. Netdata has rewritten the systemd-journal plugin to improve its performance and visualization capabilities. This allows for better visualization of critical systems and security information. Additionally, Netdata is standardizing the way logs are handled as part of the platform, which enables support for more log management engines like Loki and Elasticsearch.

Another notable improvement is the changes made to the way metrics are collected and exposed in the Netdata Agent UI. This allows for easier slicing and dicing of data and better compatibility with OpenTelemetry specifications. The apps.plugin now exposes charts in the Applications section of the dashboard using the NIDL framework, while systemd units charts have been updated to have an instance for each systemd unit. Disk charts also have additional labels to help identify disks from the charts.

The Netdata Health engine has also undergone changes to improve integration with the new dashboard. These changes include better multi-node alerting on parents and the ability to evaluate and configure alerts directly from the UI.

In terms of performance, Netdata now has lower resource utilization, including lower memory usage and disk footprint. The self-vacuuming of SQLite databases has also been implemented. Notably, Netdata now requires only 1 pointer for each use of a label name-value combination, significantly improving memory requirements in setups like busy Kubernetes clusters.

Other improvements include the ability to run a 32-bit Netdata on a 64-bit IoT operating system, the availability of Netdata Cloud to be installed on-premises, and enhancements to VMware vSphere monitoring.

Looking ahead, Netdata is working on several areas for future releases. These include the development of a Logs Explorer for Loki and Elasticsearch, allowing for exploration, querying, and visualization of logs from these sources. Netdata is also working on making all integrations configurable via the dashboard and allowing alerts to be configured directly from the UI. Additionally, Netdata is preparing to release a mobile app for receiving push notifications and exploring alert statuses. The scalability of Netdata in larger environments is also a focus for future improvements.

As part of the release, there are also deprecation notices for certain components and changes that will be implemented in future releases. These changes aim to improve the functionality and usability of Netdata.

Overall, the release of Netdata version v1.43.0 brings significant improvements and new features that enhance the performance, functionality, and usability of Netdata for server monitoring and management.