Netdata, real-time server monitoring

There is not much to configure, really. You can access http://localhost:19999/ (where localhost can be substituted by the ip of your server) and will take you to the default dashboard.

For OpenWrt config file is already optimized for low resources devices.

What you might want to do is create a custom dashboard that fits the most important metrics you want to follow quickly.

Unique IDs reffer to the part of the system or metric being monitored. It could be system.cpu (for CPU usage), system.ram (ram usage), net.eth1 (bandwith monitor on interface eth1), disk.sda (Disk I/O Bandwidth in sda disk), etc.

You can check the full existing IDs being monitored in http://your.server.ip:19999/api/v1/charts and expand the charts section. The ID is declared as:

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<div data-netdata="system.cpu"
     ></div>

The default chart library is dygraph, but you can set a different chart library per chart using data-chart-library. The graphs can be dygraph, d3, d3pie, gauge, google, easypiechart, peity, sparkline and text-only. The documentation is not very clear on how to use each graph, but mostly dygraph, easypiechart, d3pie and gauge will give you most the graphical input needed. The type of graph is declared as:

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<div data-netdata="net.eth1"
     data-chart-library="dygraph"
     ></div>

You can specify other attributes such as tittle, colors, height and width to prettify the dashboard.

• Title: Will override default tittle text data-title="my super chart"
• Colors: By default, netdata uses an internal palette of colors for the dimensions of the charts. You can prepend colors to it (so that your will be used first) using this data-colors="#AABBCC #DDEEFF ..."
• Height and with: You can specify a custom height and width and it can be anything CSS accepts for width and height (e.g. percentages, pixels, etc) data-width="WIDTH" and data-height="HEIGHT"
• Data points: For the time-frame requested, netdata will use the chart dimensions and the settings of the chart library to find out how many data points it can show. A default dygraph will show 10 min of data (600 s), you can set the data point to 300 in order to update the graph every 2 s data-points="300"
• Data dimensions: By default, a netdata graph will show all the dimensions of the chart. You can select specific dimensions using this data-dimensions="dimension1,dimension2,dimension3,..." You can check all the dimensions by expanding the ID in the chart section in http://your.server.ip:19999/api/v1/charts. For example, net.eth1 dimensions are received and sent. This attribute is useful for graphs like pie or gauge to display an specific dimension of a metric.

In summary, you could have a dygraph and gauge like this:

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<div data-netdata="disk.sda"
     data-title="Read-Write sda"
     data-chart-library="dygraph"
     data-width="80%"
     data-height="100%"
     data-points="300"
     ></div>
<div data-netdata="net.eth1"
     data-title="Received data"
     data-dimensions="received"
     data-chart-library="gauge"
     data-width="20%"
     data-height="100%"
     data-points="300"
     ></div>