Collect system metrics with Netdata

Netdata collects thousands of metrics directly from the operating systems of physical and virtual systems, IoT/edge devices, and containers with zero configuration.

To gather system metrics, Netdata uses roughly a dozen plugins, each of which has one or more collectors for very specific metrics exposed by the host. The system metrics Netdata users interact with most for health monitoring and performance troubleshooting are collected and visualized by proc.plugin, cgroups.plugin, and ebpf.plugin.

proc.plugin gathers metrics from the /proc and /sys folders in Linux systems, along with a few other endpoints, and is responsible for the bulk of the system metrics collected and visualized by Netdata. It collects CPU, memory, disks, load, networking, mount points, and more with zero configuration. It even allows Netdata to monitor its own resource utilization!

cgroups.plugin collects rich metrics about containers and virtual machines using the virtual files under /sys/fs/cgroup. By reading cgroups, Netdata can instantly collect resource utilization metrics for systemd services, all containers (Docker, LXC, LXD, Libvirt, systemd-nspawn), and more. Learn more in the collecting container metrics doc.

ebpf.plugin: Netdata's extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) collector monitors Linux kernel-level metrics for file descriptors, virtual filesystem IO, and process management. You can use our eBPF collector to analyze how and when a process accesses files, when it makes system calls, whether it leaks memory or creating zombie processes, and more.

While the above plugins and associated collectors are the most important for system metrics, there are many others. You can find all system collectors in our supported collectors list.

Collect Windows system metrics

Netdata is also capable of monitoring Windows systems. The WMI collector integrates with windows_exporter, a small Go-based binary that you can run on Windows systems. The WMI collector then gathers metrics from an endpoint created by windows_exporter.

First, download windows_exporter and run it with the following collectors enabled, changing 0.14.0 to the version you downloaded.

windows_exporter-0.14.0-amd64.exe --collectors.enabled="cpu,memory,net,logical_disk,os,system,logon"

Next, configure the WMI collector to point to the URL and port of your exposed endpoint. Restart Netdata with sudo systemctl restart netdata, or the appropriate method for your system. You'll start seeing Windows system metrics, such as CPU utilization, memory, bandwidth per NIC, number of processes, and much more.

For information about collecting metrics from applications running on Windows systems, see the application metrics doc.

What's next?

Because there's some overlap between system metrics and container metrics, you should investigate Netdata's container compatibility if you use them heavily in your infrastructure.

If you don't use containers, skip ahead to collecting application metrics with Netdata.