Free Cloud Server Monitoring Services: Netdata, New Relic, Datadog, Instrumental

NodeQuery is a free monitoring service provider which provides a free, lightweight and easy to use linux server monitoring service. You also will get alerts and actively monitor the performance of your servers. Unfortunately, their website is not accessible since end of Sep (Sep 25, 2021)

In this post, I am going to introduce other online free monitoring service providers as alteratives. 

Free Plans 

To sign up a free plan, all of those four sites are no credit card required. All of them are having paid plan which provides advanced features and longer data retention period. 

	NetData	New Relic	Datadog	Instrumental
Free Plan	Unlimited nodes Unlimited Containers Unlimited Metrics 1s metrics granularity Unlimited data retention (Data is inside your infrastructure) Unlimited users Unlimited alarms and notifications 200+ Data collection integration	Free forever 1 free full user Unlimited free base users 100GB free per month data for ingest 8 days+ data retention Unlimited querying 100 Synthetics checks Unlimited free alerts Free proactive anomaly detection 1K free incident intelligence events per month	Up to 5 hosts 1 day metric retention 450+ integrations Unlimited user accounts	Up to 500 metrics 13 Months of data visibility
Installing Agent	-          One command installer -          Docker	Guided install: One command installer, Docker, configuration management tools	One command installer Docker	One command installer
Limitation	No advanced user control and auditing Data and calculation is on local infrastructure. Heavy agent	No integration with other authentication. Installation is taking a bit long and complicated.	No alerts No Container monitoring No anomaly detection	No support for Arm architecture.
Pricing	https://www.netdata.cloud/pricing/	https://newrelic.com/pricing	https://www.datadoghq.com/pricing/	https://instrumentalapp.com/pricing

There is one more which is also providing free monitoring to the servers, free forever, 15 Uptime monitors, 1 minute internval, which is great for a small environment. 

HetrixTools

• HetrixTools - A Free & Powerful with Full Function Website and Server Performance Cloud Monitor Site

Dashboard Screenshots

Netdata

Per sec update for CPU:

For Memory

New Relic:

Datadog

Instrumental

Netdata

Data stored on local

Netdata offers a granular approach to data retention, allowing you to manage storage based on both time and disk space. This provides greater control and helps you optimize storage usage for your specific needs.

Default Retention Limits:

Tier	Resolution	Time Limit	Size Limit
0	high (per second)	14 days	1 GiB
1	middle (per minute)	3 months	1 GiB
2	low (per hour)	2 years	1 GiB

With these defaults, Netdata requires approximately 4 GiB of storage space (including metadata).

From: 

• https://learn.netdata.cloud/docs/netdata-agent/configuration/optimizing-metrics-database/change-how-long-netdata-stores-metrics#

Change the limit

The Netdata config directory​: Some operating systems will use /opt/netdata/etc/netdata/ as the config directory. If you're not sure where yours is, navigate to http://NODE:19999/netdata.conf in your browser, replacing NODE with the IP address or hostname of your node, and find the # config directory = setting.

You can change these limits in netdata.conf:

[db]
    mode = dbengine 
    storage tiers = 3

    # Tier 0, per second data. Set to 0 for no limit.
    dbengine tier 0 disk space MB = 1024
    dbengine tier 0 retention days = 14

    # Tier 1, per minute data. Set to 0 for no limit.
    dbengine tier 1 disk space MB = 1024
    dbengine tier 1 retention days = 90

    # Tier 2, per hour data. Set to 0 for no limit.
    dbengine tier 2 disk space MB = 1024
    dbengine tier 2 retention days = 730

Add Node:

Click nodes tab, then click Add nodes button. 

You can choose different OS to generate code to add nodes in. 

Delete Node:

Delete option is hiden inside of space settings page.

NetData Agent Installation

Windows:

Download netdata-x64.msi file then double click to run. 

You will need claim token and rooms id, which you can find out from the script.

Linux:

just run the script you found from your portal.

NetData Docker

Netdata is distributed, real-time, performance and health monitoring for systems and applications. It is a highly optimized monitoring agent you install on all your systems and containers.

Netdata provides unparalleled insights, in real-time, of everything happening on the systems it runs (including web servers, databases, applications), using highly interactive web dashboards. It can run autonomously, without any third party components, or it can be integrated to existing monitoring toolchains (Prometheus, Graphite, OpenTSDB, Kafka, Grafana, etc).

Netdata is fast and efficient, designed to permanently run on all systems (physical & virtual servers, containers, IoT devices), without disrupting their core function.

Netdata is free, open-source software and it currently runs on Linux, FreeBSD, and MacOS.

GitHub : https://github.com/netdata/netdata Documentation: https://docs.netdata.cloud

docker run -d --name=netdata \
  -p 19999:19999 \
  -v /proc:/host/proc:ro \
  -v /sys:/host/sys:ro \
  -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro \
  --cap-add SYS_PTRACE \
  --security-opt apparmor=unconfined \
  netdata/netdata

The above can be converted to docker-compose file for ease of management:

version: '3'
services:
  netdata:
    image: netdata/netdata
    hostname: example.com # set to fqdn of host
    ports:
      - 19999:19999
    cap_add:
      - SYS_PTRACE
    security_opt:
      - apparmor:unconfined
    volumes:
      - /proc:/host/proc:ro
      - /sys:/host/sys:ro
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro

Latest docker commands or docker-compse-yml file:

• https://learn.netdata.cloud/docs/netdata-agent/installation/docker

YouTube Videos

References

• https://www.netdata.cloud/