Common configuration changes

The Netdata Agent requires no configuration upon installation to collect thousands of per-second metrics from most systems, containers, and applications, but there are hundreds of settings to tweak if you want to exercise more control over your monitoring platform.

This document assumes familiarity with using edit-config from the Netdata config directory.

Change dashboards and visualizations

The Netdata Agent's local dashboard, accessible at http://NODE:19999 is highly configurable. If you use Netdata Cloud for infrastructure monitoring, you will see many of these changes reflected in those visualizations due to the way Netdata Cloud proxies metric data and metadata to your browser.

Increase the long-term metrics retention period

Read our doc on increasing long-term metrics storage for details, including a calculator to help you determine the exact settings for your desired retention period.

Reduce the data collection frequency

Change update every in the [global] section of netdata.conf so that it is greater than 1. An update every of 5 means the Netdata Agent enforces a minimum collection frequency of 5 seconds.

[global]
    update every = 5

Every collector and plugin has its own update every setting, which you can also change in the go.d.conf, python.d.conf or charts.d.conf files, or in individual collector configuration files. If the update every for an individual collector is less than the global, the Netdata Agent uses the global setting. See the enable or configure a collector doc for details.

Disable a collector or plugin

Turn off entire plugins in the [plugins] section of netdata.conf.

To disable specific collectors, open go.d.conf, python.d.conf or charts.d.conf and find the line for that specific module. Uncomment the line and change its value to no.

Modify alerts and notifications

Netdata's health monitoring watchdog uses hundreds of preconfigured health entities, with intelligent thresholds, to generate warning and critical alerts for most production systems and their applications without configuration. However, each alert and notification method is completely customizable.

Add a new alert

To create a new alert configuration file, initiate an empty file, with a filename that ends in .conf, in the health.d/ directory. The Netdata Agent loads any valid alert configuration file ending in .conf in that directory. Next, edit the new file with edit-config. For example, with a file called example-alert.conf.

sudo touch health.d/example-alert.conf
sudo ./edit-config health.d/example-alert.conf

Or, append your new alert to an existing file by editing a relevant existing file in the health.d/ directory.

Read more about configuring alerts to get started, and see the health monitoring reference for a full listing of options available in health entities.

Configure a specific alert

Tweak existing alerts by editing files in the health.d/ directory. For example, edit health.d/cpu.conf to change how the Agent responds to anomalies related to CPU utilization.

To see which configuration file you need to edit to configure a specific alert, view your active alerts in Netdata Cloud or the local Agent dashboard and look for the source line. For example, it might read source 4@/usr/lib/netdata/conf.d/health.d/cpu.conf.

Because the source path contains health.d/cpu.conf, run sudo edit-config health.d/cpu.conf to configure that alert.

Disable a specific alert

Open the configuration file for that alert and set the to line to silent.

template: disk_fill_rate
       on: disk.space
   lookup: max -1s at -30m unaligned of avail
     calc: ($this - $avail) / (30 * 60)
    every: 15s
       to: silent

Turn of all alerts and notifications

Set enabled to no in the [health] section of netdata.conf.

Enable alert notifications

Open health_alarm_notify.conf for editing. First, read the enabling notifications doc for an example of the process using Slack, then click on the link to your preferred notification method to find documentation for that specific endpoint.

Improve node security

While the Netdata Agent is both open and secure by design, we recommend every user take some action to administer and secure their nodes.

Learn more about the available options in the security design documentation.

Reduce resource usage

Read our performance optimization guide for a long list of specific changes that can reduce the Netdata Agent's CPU/memory footprint and IO requirements.

Organize nodes with host labels

Beginning with v1.20, Netdata accepts user-defined host labels. These labels are sent during streaming, exporting, and as metadata to Netdata Cloud, and help you organize the metrics coming from complex infrastructure. Host labels are defined in the section [host labels].

For a quick introduction, read the host label guide.

The following restrictions apply to host label names:

• Names cannot start with _, but it can be present in other parts of the name.
• Names only accept alphabet letters, numbers, dots, and dashes.

The policy for values is more flexible, but you can not use exclamation marks (!), whitespaces ( ), single quotes ('), double quotes ("), or asterisks (*), because they are used to compare label values in health alerts and templates.