Netdata is a powerful tool that can help you monitor your servers with ease and efficiency. It’s a distributed, real-time, performance, and health monitoring platform that can collect and display thousands of metrics from your servers, hardware, containers, and applications, including RAM and CPU usage.
Netdata has many features and benefits that make it a great choice for server monitoring, such as:
- Real-time data collection and visualization: Netdata collects metrics every second, and displays them on interactive charts that update every second as well. This means you can see exactly what’s happening on your servers without any delays.
- Infinite scalability: Netdata can scale to any number of servers and metrics without compromising performance or accuracy. It stores the data locally on each server, which means it doesn’t need a central database or a query engine. You can also use Netdata Cloud to view metrics from multiple servers in one dashboard, with secure streaming and encryption.
- Flexible and modular architecture: Netdata can monitor any system, service, or application that exposes metrics with the help of its modular architecture and hundreds of integrations. You can also extend Netdata with custom collectors, plugins, dashboards, alarms, notifications, and more. Netdata is open-source and community-driven, so you can always find new features and improvements.
- Zero configuration: Netdata is designed to work out of the box, without any need for configuration. It can auto-detect metrics from your servers and applications, and display them on preconfigured dashboards with meaningful visualizations and health alarms.
Netdata is compatible with RunCloud, so you can use it alongside our platform to manage your web applications.
How to Install Netdata on RunCloud Servers
If you want to install Netdata on your RunCloud server, you can follow these simple steps:
- Sign up for Netdata: To use Netdata Cloud, you’ll need to sign up for a free account on their website. Netdata Cloud will allow you to view metrics from multiple servers in one dashboard, and access other features such as Metric Correlations and War Rooms.
- SSH into your RunCloud server: To install Netdata on your server, you’ll need to access it via SSH. If you don’t know how to do this, you can read our post on how to connect to your RunCloud server using SSH. You will need your server’s IP address, username, and password or SSH key.
- Open Installation Script: Once you have logged into your server via SSH, go to the Netdata dashboard and go to the “All Nodes” tab. Once there, click on “+ Add Node” button to view the installation script.
- Execute the given command: You can install Netdata on your server with a single kickstart command. Change the update channel to “Stable“, and then copy the given installation command.
Upon execution, the above command will download and run a script that will install Netdata and its dependencies on your server. Go back to your SSH terminal, paste the given command, and then press ‘Enter’.
During installation, it will ask you some questions about automatic updates, release channels, anonymous statistics, and Netdata Cloud connection. Press ‘Y’ to confirm the installation and then press ‘Enter’.
After this, the installation daemon will ask you which services should be restarted. You can use the arrow keys to navigate up/down and press the spacebar to select/deselect options if you want to do so.
In most cases, default selection is right choice for most people. Press the ‘Tab’ key on your keyboard – this will move cursor to the next position. Make sure that the ‘Ok’ is highlighted, and then press ‘Enter‘ to continue the installation.
You will be asked to confirm the installation once again, press ‘Y’ to confirm, and then press ‘Enter‘.
After this, the installation script will once again ask you which services should be restarted – leave these settings to default. Press ‘Tab‘ to highlight the ‘Ok’ button, and press ‘Enter‘ to finish the installation.
That’s it! You have successfully installed Netdata on your RunCloud server. You can now access the Netdata web interface by visiting your Netdata dashboard.
How to View Server Metrics
To see the RAM and CPU usage of different servers, you can use either Netdata’s web interface or Netdata Cloud. Both options will show you interactive charts that update every second with real-time metrics.
Using Netdata’s Web Interface
Netdata hosts a dashboard on your server, which you can view by visiting port 19999 of your server. You can change this port by editing the Netdata configuration file. By default, RunCloud blocks all non-standard ports. Therefore, you’ll need to either connect to your server via a VPN, or open up the ports to visit the dashboard.
To open up ports, go to your RunCloud dashboard and open the “Security” tab of the server. Click on “Add New Rule” and create a new rule to open up the specified ports on TCP and UDP. Once you have created all of the rules, you’ll need to click “Deploy” to save the changes.
Once you have opened up the firewall, anyone on the internet can view your Netdata Dashboard by visiting http://<ip address>:19999.
Note: this will allow you to view the dashboard only for this particular server – if you have more than one server, you must repeat this step for all of them.
This option presents a simplified user interface that displays all metrics of the selected server. This is useful if you don’t want to log into your Netdata Cloud account to view the metrics. However, you won’t be able to make any changes in this dashboard; for that, you will still need to log into your account.
Using Netdata Cloud Dashboard
Once you have connected a node to your cloud account, you can see it in your dashboard. One cloud account can connect to many servers, so you’ll need to navigate the dashboard and search for the server that you want to view.
To view all available nodes connected to your account, navigate to the “All Nodes” page, and switch to the “Nodes” tab to view all connected nodes.
In the above screenshot, we can see two nodes are connected to our Netdata account. The first node is inactive, and the second node is posting metrics to the cloud. You can click on this node to view detailed metrics.
The above screenshot shows the overview of the system metrics. To view detailed metrics such as disk, memory, CPU usage, etc. for a particular application, click on the “Applications” button in the tab on the right of the screen.
Besides monitoring, you can also use this dashboard to invite new users and collaborate with them.
Final Thoughts
Netdata is a powerful and easy-to-use tool that provides real-time insights into your server’s performance and health. You can use Netdata to visualize and analyze various metrics such as memory usage, CPU load, disk I/O, network traffic, and more. You can also set up alerts and notifications to get notified when something goes wrong with your web app.
By using Netdata on RunCloud, you can benefit from the seamless integration and compatibility between the two platforms. If you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to leave a comment below.
If you’re tired of managing your own servers – you might want to check out RunCloud (yep, that’s us!). RunCloud is built for developers that want to focus on shipping great work, not on managing their infrastructure. We provide painless server configuration so you don’t need to spend hours figuring it out – get started with RunCloud today & get up and running in minutes.
