Software Alternatives & Reviews

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.

Prometheus

Pricing URL
-
$ Details
Platforms
-
Release Date
-

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

No features have been listed yet.

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
92 92%
8% 8
Performance Monitoring
82 82%
18% 18
Data Dashboard
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

Share your experience with using Prometheus and Netdata. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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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

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
10 Best Open Source Monitoring Software for IT Infrastructure
This list won’t be complete without including two fantastic open-source solutions – Prometheus and Grafana. Its DIY solution where you use Prometheus to scrape the metrics from server, OS, applications and use Grafana to visualize them.
Source: geekflare.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 225 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 (225)

  • Release Radar · April 2024 Edition: Major updates from the open source community
    It's like Prometheus, but for logs. Okay it's not really to do with the Norse or Greek gods, instead Loki is a horizontally-scalable, highly-available, multi-tenant log aggregation system inspired by the open source project Prometheus. Built by Grafana Labs, Loki is designed for ease of use. Instead of indexing the contents of the logs, Loki provides a set of labels for each log stream. The latest update includes... - Source: dev.to / 2 days ago
  • Tools for frontend monitoring with Prometheus
    Developers widely use Prometheus as a system for operational monitoring and alerting for their projects. Here is a list of tools for monitoring frontend services with Prometheus. - Source: dev.to / 25 days ago
  • On Implementation of Distributed Protocols
    Distributed system administrators need mechanisms and tools for monitoring individual nodes in order to analyze the system and promptly detect anomalies. Developers also need effective mechanisms for analyzing, diagnosing issues, and identifying bugs in protocol implementations. Logging, tracing, and collecting metrics are common observability techniques to allow monitoring and obtaining diagnostic information... - Source: dev.to / 29 days ago
  • Golang: out-of-box backpressure handling with gRPC, proven by a Grafana dashboard
    Setting up monitoring for a system, especially one involving GRPC communication, provides crucial visibility into its operations. In this guide, we walked through the steps to instrument both a GRPC server and client with Prometheus metrics, exposed those metrics via an HTTP endpoint, and visualized them using Grafana. The Docker-Compose setup simplified the deployment of both Prometheus and Grafana, ensuring a... - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Monitoring, Observability, and Telemetry Explained
    Alerting and Notification: Select a tool with flexible alerting mechanisms to proactively detect anomalies or deviations from defined thresholds. Consider asking questions like "Does this tool offer customizable alerting options and support notification channels that suit our team's communication preferences?" A tool like Prometheus provides robust alerting capabilities. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
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 1 year 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 2 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 2 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 2 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 3 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

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

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.

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

Splunk - Splunk's operational intelligence platform helps unearth intelligent insights from machine data.

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.