Netdata Cloud Can Now Monitor Kubernetes Clusters for Free in Real-Time
Netdata, the company behind the open source, distributed, real-time, performance and health monitoring platform Netdata Cloud has expanded its ability to monitor Kubernetes. Want to see if it can help you stay on top of what’s what with your Kubernetes clusters? For now, you can use its built-in Helm chart to monitor and troubleshoot unlimited numbers of Kubernetes clusters for free in real-time.
No, that’s not a typo nor is Netdata Cloud a come-on for a freemium sales pitch. The one fly in the ointment is its tracks what’s going on by using agents and for now, most of its features are restricted to a single agent. The name of the game is to show you how valuable Netdata Cloud can be to your company and, someday down the road, they will offer paid infrastructure-wide features. In short, like GitHub and Zoom, Netdata wants to grow its customer base, hoping you’ll find the free services are useful enough to make you want to pay to make it even more useful.
Technically, Netdata CEO and founder Costas Tsaousis explained, it all started with 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. A bird’s-eye view was fine for getting an overall sense of how things were going, but kept sending me back to the command line for troubleshooting.
So, Tsaousis released the first version of Netdata as free, open source software under GPLv3. Moving forward, the company is investing more in Linux kernel tracing with eBPF, container monitoring, a generic Prometheus OpenMetrics collector, and possibly supporting OpenTelemetry.
Specifically for Kubernetes, Netdata Cloud users can now easily access the platform’s built-in Helm chart to monitor and troubleshoot unlimited numbers of Kubernetes clusters for free in real-time. This data is displayed via the Netdata Cloud web interface.
The company announced this new augmentation to its monitoring technology at KubeCon+CloudNativeCon EU, held last week, virtually.
Using its distributed data architecture, Robin Schumacher, Netdata vice president of product, said Netdata Cloud enables DevOps teams to easily visualize their infrastructure with auto-discovery and zero-configuration. This gives users a Kubernetes monitoring experience that meets the demands of developers, Site Reliability Engineers, and sysadmins. “Simple deployment, granular monitoring, and providing full visibility into IT black boxes are all key elements to effective troubleshooting, especially when using Kubernetes to orchestrate distributed systems. Netdata helps everyone be effective and uncover issues in Kubernetes deployments.”
Netdata Kubernetes monitoring features now include:
- Features auto-discovery and metric collection from the node itself,
kubelet/kube-proxy,pods/containers, and any containerized services or applications, such as databases and web servers, and then auto-configures visualizations within minutes. - Removes the black-box feel of traditional Kubernetes monitoring by granting developers, SRE’s and system administrators full visibility into their clusters, allowing them to digest all metrics and activity while troubleshooting anomalies in an easy-to-navigate visual interface.
- Simplifies the deployment process, enabling users to visualize what is going on inside containers from CPU usage to disk IO, without manually setting up charts or writing queries to retrieve data.
