[ktsaou]

Thank you for this feedback. I am the founder of Netdata.

Netdata is about making our lives easier. If you need to tweak Netdata, please open a github issue to let us know. It is a bug. Netdata should provide the best possible dashboards and alerts out of the box. If it does not for you, we missed something and we need your help to fix it, so please open a github issue to let us know of your use case. We want Netdata to be installed and effectively used with zero configuration, even mid-crisis, so although tweaking is possible and we support plenty of it, it should not be required.

An "incident" is a way to organize people, an issue management tool for monitoring, a collaboration feature. Netdata's primary goal however, is about exploring and understanding our infrastructure. We are trying to be amazingly effective in this by providing unlimited high resolution metrics, real-time dashboards and battle tested alarms. In our roadmap we have many features that we believe will change the way we understand monitoring. We are changing even the most fundamental features of a chart.

Of course at the same time we are trying to improve collaboration. This is why Netdata.Cloud, our free-forever SaaS offering that complements the open-source agent to provide out of the box infrastructure-level monitoring along side several convenience features, organizes our infra in war-rooms. In these war-rooms we have added metrics correlation tools that can help us find the most relevant metrics for something that got our attention, an alarm, a spike or a dive on a chart.

For Netdata, the high level incident panel you are looking for, will be based on a mix of charts and alarms. And we hope it is going to be also fully automated, autodetected and provided with zero configuration and tweaking. Stay tuned. We are baking it...

[Croftengea]

> our free-forever SaaS offering that complements the open-source agent

How do you make or plan to make money?

[ktsaou]

The same way GitHub, Slack or Cloudflare provide massively free-forever SaaS offerings while making money.

We believe that the world will greatly benefit by a monitoring solution that is massively battle tested, highly opinionated, incorporating all the knowledge and experience of the community for monitoring infrastructure, systems and applications. A solution that is installed in seconds, even mid-crisis and is immediately effective in identifying performance and stability issues.

The tricky part is to find a way to support this and sustain it indefinitely. We believe we nailed it!

So, we plan to avoid selling monitoring features. Our free offering will never have a limit on the number of nodes monitored, the number users using it, the number of metrics collected, analyzed and presented, no limit on the granularity of data, the number of war-rooms, of dashboards, the number of alarms configured, the notifications sent, etc. All these will always be free.

And no, we are not collecting any data for ML or any other purpose. The opposite actually: we plan to release ML at the edge, so that each server will learn its own behavior.

We plan to eventually sell increased convenience features, enforcement of compliance to business policies and enterprise specific integrations, all of them on top of the free offering.

[sdesol]

I was analyzing the activity in the netdata project and what I found interesting was this project is less active than I would have thought. See the following for insights into the project:

https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?q=wind...

In the last 30 days, there were 2 frequent and 3 occasional contributors. I honestly thought frequent contributors would have been much higher, which leads me to believe the project is quite mature and they don't need a lot of people to work on netdata.

Based on Crunchbase, they've raised about 33 million so far and if the number of people required to maintain netbase is low (relatively speaking that is), I can see them not really needing to worry about making money and I'm guessing they are finding value in gathering data for ML.

[ktsaou]

> they've raised about 33 million

yes, this is right

> if the number of people required to maintain netbase is low (relatively speaking that is)

The Netdata agent is a robust and mature product. We maintain it and we constantly improve it, but:

- most of our efforts go to Netdata.Cloud

- most of the action in the agent is in internal forks we have. For example, we are currently testing ML at the edge. This will eventually go into the agent, but is not there yet. Same with EBPF. We do a lot of work to streamline the process of providing the best EBPF experience out there.

> I can see them not really needing to worry about making money

We are going to make money on top of the free tier of Netdata.Cloud. We are currently building the free tier. In about a year from now we will start introducing new paid features to Netdata.Cloud. Whatever we will have released by then, will always be free.

> I'm guessing they are finding value in gathering data for ML

No, we are not gathering any data for any purpose. Our database is distributed. Your data are your data. We don't need them.

[sdesol]

Hey thanks for the insights. I figured effort was being spent elsewhere and/or was not visible in the public repo.

[andrewm4894]

oh cool that's a nice tool.

p.s. i am the only person working on ML at Netdata and i can confirm we don't gather any data for ML purposes, which is actually my biggest challenge right now :) - convincing people the ML can be useful without having lots of nice labeled data from real netdata users to be able to quantify that with typical metrics like accuracy etc. I'm hoping to introduce mainly unsupervised ML features into the product that don't rely on lots of labeled data and have thumbs up/down type feedback and we can then use that to figure out if new ML based features are working or being useful for users. So any models that would be trained would be trained on the host and live on the host as opposed to in Netdata Cloud somewhere.

[sdesol]

> i am the only person working on ML at Netdata and i can confirm we don't gather any data for ML purposes, which is actually my biggest challenge right now :)

Yeah I would have to imagine that it would be an issue. This is just my personal opinion, but I think there should be a way to provide anonymized data for building models for anomaly detection. Maybe an opt-in feature, as it would benefit everybody using netdata, but this is just my own personal opinion.

[nawgz]

This is a good question, their website doesn't seem to have any "Pricing" information anywhere and everything is "get now" and "sign up for free"...