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Installation guide

Netdata is a monitoring agent designed to run on all your systems: physical and virtual servers, containers, even IoT/edge devices. Netdata runs on Linux, FreeBSD, macOS, Kubernetes, Docker, and all their derivatives.

The best way to install Netdata is with our automatic one-line installation script, which works with all Linux distributions and most macOS environments.

If you want to install Netdata with Docker, on a Kubernetes cluster, or a different operating system, see Have a different operating system, or want to try another method?

Some third parties, such as the packaging teams at various Linux distributions, distribute old, broken, or altered packages. We recommend you install Netdata using one of the methods listed below to guarantee you get the latest checksum-verified packages.

Netdata collects anonymous usage information by default and sends it to our self hosted PostHog installation. PostHog is an open source product analytics platform, you can read about the information collected, and learn how to-opt, on our anonymous statistics page.

The usage statistics are vital for us, as we use them to discover bugs and prioritize new features. We thank you for actively contributing to Netdata's future.

Automatic one-line installation script​

This method is fully automatic on all Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, CentOS, and others, as well as on mac OS environments.

To install Netdata, including all dependencies required to connect to Netdata Cloud, and get automatic nightly updates, run the following as your normal user:

wget -O /tmp/netdata-kickstart.sh https://my-netdata.io/kickstart.sh && sh /tmp/netdata-kickstart.sh

Or, if you have cURL but not wget (such as on macOS):

curl https://my-netdata.io/kickstart.sh > /tmp/netdata-kickstart.sh && sh /tmp/netdata-kickstart.sh

This script will preferentially use native DEB/RPM packages if we provide them for your platform.

To see more information about this installation script, including how to disable automatic updates, get nightly vs. stable releases, or disable anonymous statistics, see the kickstart.sh method page.

Scroll down for details about automatic updates or nightly vs. stable releases.

Post-installation​

When you're finished with installation, check out our single-node or infrastructure monitoring quickstart guides based on your use case.

Or, skip straight to configuring the Netdata Agent.

Read through Netdata's documentation, which is structured based on actions and solutions, to enable features like health monitoring, alarm notifications, long-term metrics storage, exporting to external databases, and more.

Have a different operating system, or want to try another method?​

Netdata works on many different platforms. To see all supported platforms, check out our platform support policy.

Below, you can find a few additional installation methods, followed by separate instructions for a variety of unique operating systems.

Alternative methods​

General Linux with one-line installer (recommended)

Run with Docker

Deploy on Kubernetes

Install on macOS

Linux from Git

Linux from source

Linux for offline nodes

Automatic updates​

By default, Netdata's installation scripts enable automatic updates for both nightly and stable release channels.

If you would prefer to update your Netdata agent manually, you can disable automatic updates by using the --no-updates option when you install or update Netdata using the automatic one-line installation script.

wget -O /tmp/netdata-kickstart.sh https://my-netdata.io/kickstart.sh && sh /tmp/netdata-kickstart.sh --no-updates

With automatic updates disabled, you can choose exactly when and how you update Netdata.

Network usage of Netdata’s automatic updater​

The auto-update functionality set up by the installation scripts requires working internet access to function correctly. In particular, it currently requires access to GitHub (to check if a newer version of the updater script is available or not, as well as potentially fetching build-time dependencies that are bundled as part of the install), and Google Cloud Storage (to check for newer versions of Netdata and download the sources if there is a newer version).

Note that the auto-update functionality will check for updates to itself independently of updates to Netdata, and will try to use the latest version of the updater script whenever possible. This is intended to reduce the amount of effort required by users to get updates working again in the event of a bug in the updater code.

Nightly vs. stable releases​

The Netdata team maintains two releases of the Netdata agent: nightly and stable. By default, Netdata's installation scripts will give you automatic, nightly updates, as that is our recommended configuration.

Nightly: We create nightly builds every 24 hours. They contain fully-tested code that fixes bugs or security flaws, or introduces new features to Netdata. Every nightly release is a candidate for then becoming a stable release—when we're ready, we simply change the release tags on GitHub. That means nightly releases are stable and proven to function correctly in the vast majority of Netdata use cases. That's why nightly is the best choice for most Netdata users.

Stable: We create stable releases whenever we believe the code has reached a major milestone. Most often, stable releases correlate with the introduction of new, significant features. Stable releases might be a better choice for those who run Netdata in mission-critical production systems, as updates will come more infrequently, and only after the community helps fix any bugs that might have been introduced in previous releases.

Pros of using nightly releases:

  • Get the latest features and bug fixes as soon as they're available
  • Receive security-related fixes immediately
  • Use stable, fully-tested code that's always improving
  • Leverage the same Netdata experience our community is using

Pros of using stable releases:

  • Protect yourself from the rare instance when major bugs slip through our testing and negatively affect a Netdata installation
  • Retain more control over the Netdata version you use

Troubleshooting and known issues​

We are tracking a few issues related to installation and packaging.

Older distributions (Ubuntu 14.04, Debian 8, CentOS 6) and OpenSSL​

If you're running an older Linux distribution or one that has reached EOL, such as Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Debian 8, or CentOS 6, your Agent may not be able to securely connect to Netdata Cloud due to an outdated version of OpenSSL. These old versions of OpenSSL cannot perform hostname validation, which helps securely encrypt SSL connections.

If you choose to continue using the outdated version of OpenSSL, your node will still connect to Netdata Cloud, albeit with hostname verification disabled. Without verification, your Netdata Cloud connection could be vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks.

CentOS 6 and CentOS 8​

To install the Agent on certain CentOS and RHEL systems, you must enable non-default repositories, such as EPEL or PowerTools, to gather hard dependencies. See the CentOS 6 and CentOS 8 sections for more information.

Access to file is not permitted​

If you see an error similar to Access to file is not permitted: /usr/share/netdata/web//index.html when you try to visit the Agent dashboard at http://NODE:19999, you need to update Netdata's permissions to match those of your system.

Run ls -la /usr/share/netdata/web/index.html to find the file's permissions. You may need to change this path based on the error you're seeing in your browser. In the below example, the file is owned by the user root and the group root.

ls -la /usr/share/netdata/web/index.html
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 89377 May  5 06:30 /usr/share/netdata/web/index.html

These files need to have the same user and group used to install your netdata. Suppose you installed netdata with user netdata and group netdata, in this scenario you will need to run the following command to fix the error:

# chown -R netdata.netdata /usr/share/netdata/web

Multiple versions of OpenSSL​

We've received reports from the community about issues with running the kickstart.sh script on systems that have both a distribution-installed version of OpenSSL and a manually-installed local version. The Agent's installer cannot handle both.

Clang compiler on Linux​

Our current build process has some issues when using certain configurations of the clang C compiler on Linux. See the section on nonrepresentable section on output errors for a workaround.

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