Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Prometheus VS Netdata

Compare Prometheus VS Netdata and see what are their differences

Prometheus logo Prometheus

An open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit.

Netdata logo Netdata

Monitor your servers, containers, and applications, in high-resolution and in real-time.
  • Prometheus Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-10-13
  • Netdata Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-02-16

Netdata collects metrics per second & presents them in low-latency dashboards. It is designed to run on all physical & virtual servers, cloud deployments, Kubernetes clusters, and edge/IoT devices, to monitor your systems, containers & applications.

Scales nicely from a single server to thousands of servers, even in complex multi/mixed/hybrid cloud environments & given enough disk space it can keep your metrics for years.

KEY FEATURES:

💥 Collects metrics from 800+ integrations OS metrics, container metrics, VMs, hardware sensors, apps metrics, OpenMetrics exporters, StatsD & logs.

💪 Real-Time, Low-Latency, High-Resolution All metrics are collected per second & are on the dashboard immediately after data collection. Netdata is fast.

😶‍🌫️ Unsupervised Anomaly Detection Trains multiple ML models for each metric collected & detects anomalies based on the past behavior of each metric individually.

🔥 Powerful Visualization Clear & precise visualization that allows you to quickly understand any dataset, but also to filter, slice & dice the data directly on the dashboard, without the need to learn any query language.

🔔 Out of box Alerts Hundreds of alerts out of the box to detect common issues & pitfalls, revealing issues that can easily go unnoticed. It supports several notification methods to let you know when your attention is needed.

📖 systemd Journal Logs Explorer (BETA - nightly release channel) Provides a systemd journal logs explorer, to view, filter & analyze system & apps logs by directly accessing systemd journal files on individual hosts & infrastructure-wide logs centralization servers.

😎 Low Maintenance Fully automated in every aspect: automated dashboards, out-of-the-box alerts, auto-detection & discovery of metrics, zero-touch ML, easy scalability, high availability &CI/CD friendly.

⭐ Open & Extensible Netdata is a modular platform that can be extended in all possible ways and it also integrates nicely with other monitoring solutions.

Netdata

$ Details
freemium $3.0 / Monthly (Netdata Pro, $3 /Node /mo - Netdata Business, $4 /Node /mo )
Platforms
Linux Docker AWS Azure Mac OSX Cloud Windows Edge NGINX Oracle
Release Date
2018 June

Prometheus features and specs

  • Powerful Query Language
    Prometheus uses PromQL, a flexible and powerful query language that allows for complex and detailed queries.
  • Dimensional Data Model
    Prometheus employs a multidimensional data model with time series data identified by metric name and key-value pairs, offering great flexibility in data organization.
  • Auto-Discovery
    It supports service discovery mechanisms to automatically locate and scrape metrics from jobs, simplifying the monitoring process.
  • Alerting
    Prometheus includes built-in alerting capabilities that allow you to trigger alerts based on PromQL queries, which can be integrated with different alert management systems.
  • Scalability
    Its architecture, which uses independent single servers, scales well, allowing you to handle a large number of time series efficiently.
  • Open Source
    Prometheus is open-source and supported by a large community, offering transparency, regular updates, and numerous integrations.
  • Easy Integration
    Thanks to its compatibility with various data exporting standards and a myriad of existing exporters, integrating Prometheus into existing systems is streamlined.

Possible disadvantages of Prometheus

  • Single Points of Failure
    Prometheus instances operate independently, meaning that if a server goes down, the metrics it monitored will be unavailable unless replicated manually.
  • Storage Overhead
    Prometheus can consume significant storage, especially for high-resolution time series data, which might necessitate careful planning and management.
  • Limited Long-Term Storage
    By default, Prometheus is not designed for long-term storage of metrics and may require integration with other systems like Thanos or Cortex for this purpose.
  • Complexity for Beginners
    The sheer number of features and the complexities associated with PromQL can present a steep learning curve for newcomers.
  • Scaling Write Operations
    In high-scale environments, write operations might become a bottleneck due to the single-server nature of the Prometheus architecture.
  • Lack of Native High Availability
    While Prometheus supports running multiple instances, it does not provide built-in high availability features out-of-the-box, necessitating additional configurations.
  • No Built-in Authentication and Authorization
    Prometheus lacks native support for secure authentication and authorization, which means these features must be externally managed.

Netdata features and specs

  • Dashboards & visualizations
    Digestible, intuitive, and visually appealing charts for troubleshooting.
  • Configurable
    Zero configuration. Zero maintenance. No preparations. Sane defaults. Auto-detection for all metrics. Immediately usable.
  • Metrics
    Netdata collects, stores and visualizes all the metrics available. We almost never filter out metrics. The more metrics, the better.
  • Real time monitoring
    Netdata is real-time. It collects all metrics every second and it has a data collection to visualization latency of less than a millisecond.
  • Analytics and Reporting
    Detailed analysis on how applications and systems are performing

Prometheus videos

How Prometheus Monitoring works | Prometheus Architecture explained

Netdata videos

Install Netdata on Linux in two minutes

More videos:

  • Tutorial - Netdata's standard dashboard

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Prometheus and Netdata)
Monitoring Tools
90 90%
10% 10
Log Management
90 90%
10% 10
Performance Monitoring
81 81%
19% 19
Data Dashboard
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Prometheus and Netdata

Prometheus Reviews

The 10 Best Nagios Alternatives in 2024 (Paid and Open-source)
The 10 Best Prometheus Alternatives 2024 Prometheus is one of the most well-known open-source monitoring tools out there. But is it right for you? Check out these Prometheus alternatives to find out.
Source: betterstack.com
Top 11 Grafana Alternatives & Competitors [2024]
Under the hood, Grafana is powered by multiple tools like Loki, Tempo, Mimir & Prometheus. SigNoz is built as a single tool to serve logs, metrics, and traces in a single pane of glass. SigNoz uses a single datastore - ClickHouse to power its observability stack. This makes SigNoz much better in correlating signals and driving better insights.
Source: signoz.io
GCP Managed Service For Prometheus vs. Levitate | Last9
Levitate is up to 30X cost-efficient compared with Google Managed Prometheus. This is possible because of warehousing capabilities such as data tiering, streaming aggregations, and cardinality controls, making it a much superior choice to Google Managed Prometheus.
Source: last9.io
The Best Open Source Network Monitoring Tools in 2023
Description: Prometheus is an open source monitoring solution focused on data collection and analysis. It allows users to set up network monitoring capabilities using the native toolset. The tool is able to collect information on devices using SNMP pings and examine network bandwidth usage from the device perspective, among other functinos. The PromQL system analyzes data...
10 Best Linux Monitoring Tools and Software to Improve Server Performance [2022 Comparison]
Prometheus and Grafana are used together as an open-source monitoring and alerting solution with support for Linux servers. Prometheus mainly collects the Linux hardware and OS metrics exposed by *nix kernel and then stores as time-series data, using a pull model over HTTP. You can find metrics information in a multi-dimensional data model of the timestamped metrics (i.e.,...
Source: sematext.com

Netdata Reviews

The Best Cacti Monitoring Alternatives
Netdata gives you access to sublime real-time health and performance monitoring for all your systems. The Netdata GitHub community has made its growth abundantly clear throughout its last six years of active development.
10 Best Open Source Monitoring Software for IT Infrastructure
Netdata provides unparalleled real-time health monitoring and performance troubleshooting for systems and applications. Over the past six years of development, Netdata’s GitHub community has been essential to its growth.
Source: geekflare.com
4 Best Open Source Dashboard Monitoring Tools In 2019
“Pull” method : you can set Netdata to run on individual nodes and plug your dashboards directly to it. This way, you can scale your node to your needs and you are not concerned about the scaling of different nodes. Also, storage is scoped to what’s really needed by a particular node thus more efficient;

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Prometheus seems to be a lot more popular than Netdata. While we know about 273 links to Prometheus, we've tracked only 5 mentions of Netdata. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Prometheus mentions (273)

View more

Netdata mentions (5)

  • Trying to decide best practices for production environment
    Pros are instant HA and Migration. Cons are huge bandwidth hits. With your 4x1gbe you would be maxed out on replicating those 25 VMs. You wouldn't have anything for users. I have a test lab with 4 nodes, 22cpu 100gbram and 30tb space, using low end stuff, 12hdds. Proxmox, ceph dashboard, (the native ceph dashboard you can turn on), and a netdata.cloud account. So I watch it like a hawk and like to load test. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Ask HN: Reducing the maintenance surface area of hosting a small internal app
    Docker-compose, not k8s. Set up a script to update the OS, pull all your containers and reboot after hours once a week or once a day. Make sure the script specifies non interactive. Set up alerting for low disk space, see https://netdata.cloud or use your own tool. - Source: Hacker News / over 3 years ago
  • What’s your preferred stack?
    There can be some issues if you mix and match elastic versions, wazuh versions, logstash versions. But the documentation guides you very well with matrix of what is and is not compatible. You will want a beefy VM to run it in, I started smaller than I should of, and after running a while it kind of puked on itself, certain things would randomly stop working. After giving it 32GB RAM, plenty of disk 4TB, and 8... Source: over 3 years ago
  • Netdata on MacOS
    $ brew info netdata Netdata: stable 1.29.3 (bottled) Diagnose infrastructure problems with metrics, visualizations & alarms Https://netdata.cloud/ Not installed From: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/HEAD/Formula/netdata.rb License: GPL-3.0-or-later ==> Dependencies Build: autoconf ✘, automake ✘, pkg-config ✔ Required: json-c ✘, libuv ✘, lz4 ✘, openssl@1.1 ✔ ==> Caveats To start netdata: brew... Source: over 3 years ago
  • Netdata cloud and data control
    What I know is that each node's data is still primarily stored on the node itself, and I've figured that the Registry used by Netdata cloud stores only URLs and randomly generated UUIDs. So my question is, will any other data be stored outside of my nodes? Does Netdata Cloud have access to my servers 24/7 or only when I got a browser tab with Netdata cloud open? Is there more information on security and data... Source: about 4 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Prometheus and Netdata, you can also consider the following products

Grafana - Data visualization & Monitoring with support for Graphite, InfluxDB, Prometheus, Elasticsearch and many more databases

Datadog - See metrics from all of your apps, tools & services in one place with Datadog's cloud monitoring as a service solution. Try it for free.

Zabbix - Track, record, alert and visualize performance and availability of IT resources

NewRelic - New Relic is a Software Analytics company that makes sense of billions of metrics across millions of apps. We help the people who build modern software understand the stories their data is trying to tell them.

Nagios - Complete monitoring and alerting for servers, switches, applications, and services

VictoriaMetrics Anomaly Detection - Optimised Observability with AI