Web servers are among the most important components in modern IT infrastructures. They host the websites, web services, and web applications that we use on a daily basis. Social networking, media streaming, software as a service (SaaS), and other activities wouldn’t be possible without the use of web servers. And with the advent of cloud computing and the movement of more services online, web servers and their monitoring are only becoming more important.

The HTTP protocol has become the de facto standard application layer protocol of the internet. From publicly available web sites and APIs to “inter-process” communications in REST based microservice architectures or large Service Oriented Architectures based on SOAP, you find HTTP being used again and again, due to its simplicity and our familiarity with it. How many protocols can you name that have memes for their status codes?

DNS (Domain Name System) servers translate standard language web addresses to their actual IP addresses for network access. DNS response time is the time it takes a Domain Name Server to receive the request for a domain name’s IP address, process it, and return the IP address to the browser or application requesting it. When it comes to DNS response times, the lower the better, and generally values less than 100ms are considered to be in the acceptable range (depending on the application).

Most sysadmins and developers have at some point used a few of the popular Linux networking commands or their Windows equivalents to answer the common questions of host reachability- that is, whether a host or service is reachable and how fast it responds. One of the simplest, common checks, is to simply ping a host to verify that it’s reachable from where you issue the command, and to see the total time it takes for the host to receive your request.

High availability. This is what every monitoring tool needs to ensure that you never compromise on IT infrastructure visibility. On top of high availability, do you really want to enable all available features on your production system? It is important for the monitoring tool to have a low footprint on your CPU consumption and memory usage. Let’s dive deeper into the recommended way of configuring Netdata to ensure high availability and a low resource footprint through data replication.

It is sometimes easy to get lost in the mountain of metrics and infinite number of dimensions when working with an infrastructure monitoring tool. Being able to filter metrics by label and visualize only what is relevant to the current scope of monitoring & troubleshooting, becomes absolutely crucial to the success of SREs, Sysadmins and DevOps professionals.

While working on improving the Netdata PostgreSQL collector, we were monitoring our production PostgreSQL instance and something caught our attention immediately. The rows fetched ratio seemed really, really low for one particular database… there were missing indexes in PostgreSQL! Rows fetched ratio is the percentage of rows that contain data needed to execute the query (rows fetched), out of the total number of rows scanned (rows returned).

Redis is a popular open-source, in-memory data store used across industries by a variety of companies, including Github, Stack Overflow, Twitter and Netdata! Redis supports multiple use-cases including.

PostgreSQL is a popular open source object-relational database system designed to work for a wide range of workloads from single machines to data warehouses to web services with many concurrent users. PostgreSQL runs on all major operating systems and is used by teams and organizations across the world, including Netdata. If you are using PostgreSQL in production, it is crucial that you monitor it for potential issues. And the more comprehensive the monitoring the better!

The open-source community is about to benefit greatly from Netdata’s new Grafana data source plugin, which makes use of a powerful data collection engine. This new plugin maximizes the troubleshooting capabilities of Netdata in Grafana, making them more widely available. Some of the key capabilities provided to you with this plugin include the following.