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30 posts tagged with "monitoring"

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· 7 min read
Satyadeep Ashwathnarayana

systemd-journal-system-operators

System operators know the drill: as the complexity of systems scales, so does the deluge of logs. Traditionally, taming this relentless tide demands a concoction of costly tools and laborious configurations—until now. The dynamic duo of systemd-journal and Netdata is revolutionizing log management, turning what was once a Herculean task into a streamlined, powerful, and surprisingly straightforward process.

· 11 min read
Shyam Sreevalsan

blog

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.

· 11 min read

In this blog post, we will explore the importance of scalability, automation, and AI in the evolving landscape of infrastructure monitoring. We will examine how Netdata's innovative solution aligns with these emerging trends, and how it can empower organizations to effectively manage their modern IT infrastructure.

· 11 min read
Satyadeep Ashwathnarayana

stacked-netdata

In today's fast-paced digital landscape, 24-hour operations centers play a crucial role in managing and monitoring large-scale infrastructures. These centers must be equipped with an effective monitoring solution that addresses their unique needs, enabling them to respond quickly to incidents and maintain optimal system performance. Netdata, a comprehensive monitoring solution, has been designed to meet these critical requirements with its advanced capabilities and recent enhancements.

In this article, we will explore how Netdata's powerful features can transform the way 24-hour operations centers monitor and manage their complex environments, leading to improved incident detection, faster troubleshooting, and better overall system performance.

· 7 min read

The advent of multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud architectures has created new opportunities for organizations to leverage best-in-class features from various cloud service providers. However, these complex environments present their own unique challenges, especially when it comes to monitoring and managing performance.

· 13 min read
Satyadeep Ashwathnarayana

stacked-netdata

Netdata provides a comprehensive set of charts that can help you understand the workload, performance, utilization, saturation, latency, responsiveness, and maintenance activities of your disks. In this blog we will focus on monitoring disks as block devices, not as filesystems or mount points.

· 12 min read
Satyadeep Ashwathnarayana

stacked-netdata

Memory-intensive applications can benefit from improved performance by using huge pages, as they can reduce TLB pressure and memory fragmentation, and lower the memory management overhead overall. Developers should consider using HugeTLBfs in their mmap() and shmget() calls to take advantage of huge pages.

Transparent Huge Pages (THP) is a Linux kernel feature that provides some of the benefits of huge pages without requiring any development effort. However, THP can cause latency in many applications. Although kernel developers are actively working to address these issues, many system administrators prefer to disable THP altogether.

Netdata can assist in determining whether THP is helpful or harmful to your applications, which can guide your decision regarding its use.

· 11 min read
Satyadeep Ashwathnarayana

stacked-netdata

Entropy is a measure of the randomness or unpredictability of data. In the context of cryptography, entropy is used to generate random numbers or keys that are essential for secure communication and encryption. Without a good source of entropy, cryptographic protocols can become vulnerable to attacks that exploit the predictability of the generated keys.

· 5 min read
Satyadeep Ashwathnarayana

stacked-netdata

Context switching is the process of switching the CPU from one process, task or thread to another. In a multitasking operating system, such as Linux, the CPU has to switch between multiple processes or threads in order to keep the system running smoothly. This is necessary because each CPU core without hyperthreading can only execute one process or thread at a time. If there are many processes or threads running simultaneously, and very few CPU cores available to handle them, the system is forced to make more context switches to balance the CPU resources among them.

Context switching is an essential function of any multitasking operating system, but it also comes at a cost. The whole process is computationally intensive, and the more context switches that occur, the slower the system becomes. This is because each context switch involves saving the current state of the CPU, loading the state of the new process or thread, and then resuming execution of the new process or thread. This takes time and consumes CPU resources, which can slow down the system.

The impact of context switching on system performance can be significant, especially in systems with many processes or threads running simultaneously.

· 4 min read
Andrew Maguire

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We have recently extended the native machine learning (ML) based anomaly detection capabilities of Netdata to support all metrics, regardless on their collection frequency (update every).

Previously only metrics collected every second were supported, but now Netdata can run anomaly detection out of the box with zero config on metrics with any collection frequency.

This post will illustrate an example of what this means using Prometheus metrics (via the Netdata Prometheus collector) since they typically have a default collection frequency of 10 seconds.

· 9 min read
Andrew Maguire

img

We recently got this great feedback from a dear user in our Discord:

I would really like to use Netdata to monitor custom internal metrics that come from SQL, not a fan of having 10 diff systems doing essentially the same thing as is, Netdata is pretty much all there in that regard, just needs a few extra features.

This is great and exactly what we want, a clear problem or improvement we could make to help make that users monitoring life a little easier.

This is also where the beauty of open source comes in and being able to build on the shoulders of giants - adding such a feature turned out to be pretty easy by just extending our existing Pandas collector to support SQL queries leveraging its read_sql() capabilities.

Here is the PR that was merged a few days later.

This blog post will cover an example of using the Pandas collector to monitor some custom SQL metrics from a WordPress MySQL database.

· 3 min read
Chris Akritidis

The life of a sysadmin or SRE is often difficult, but occasionally very simple things can make a huge difference. Basic monitoring of your systemd services is one of those simple things, which we sometimes overlook. The simplest question one would want to know is if the thing that’s supposed to be running is actually running at all. If you use systemd services, you can guarantee an answer to that question within minutes using Netdata.