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.

For full details on the plans and prices, check out the FAQ section of the pricing page. We continue to look for ways to make Infrastructure monitoring a reality for teams and organizations of all sizes. For users to get started with monitoring, relatively small infrastructure for Home labs, students and Non profit organizations with no investment, Netdata offers the Free Community Plan.

In an era dominated by data-driven decision making, monitoring tools play an indispensable role in ensuring that our systems run efficiently and without interruption. When considering tools like Netdata and Prometheus, performance isn't just a number; it's about empowering users with real-time insights and enabling them to act with agility.

Missed the last Netdata updates? Here is what is new.

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. Understanding the nuanced differences between monitoring and observability is crucial for anyone responsible for system health and performance.

systemd journals play a crucial role in the Linux system ecosystem, and understanding the importance of the logs contained within is essential for both system administrators and developers.

Today, we released our systemd journal plugin for Netdata, allowing you to explore, view, search, filter and analyze systemd journal logs. Like most things about Netdata, this is a zero-configuration plugin. You don’t have to do anything apart from installing Netdata on your systems.This is key design direction for Netdata, since we want Netdata to be able to help even if you install it mid-crisis, while you have an incident at hand.

“Why bother with it? I let it run in the background and focus on more important DevOps work.”— a random DevOps Engineer at Reddit r/devops In an era where technology is evolving at breakneck speeds, it's easy to overlook the tools that are right under our noses. One such underutilized powerhouse is the systemd journal. For many, it's a mere tool to check the status of systemd service units or to tail the most recent events (journalctl -f).

In this blog, we will walk you through the basics of getting Netdata, Prometheus and Grafana all working together and monitoring your application servers. This article will be using docker on your local workstation. We will be working with docker in an ad-hoc way, launching containers that run /bin/bash and attaching a TTY to them. We use docker here in a purely academic fashion and do not condone running Netdata in a container.