# Netdata

> GPL-3.0 per-second monitoring agent with auto-discovery, alerts and ML anomaly detection

**Category:** Observability  
**Pricing:** open-source  
**URL:** https://www.netdata.cloud  
**GitHub:** https://github.com/netdata/netdata  
**Added:** 2026-10-21

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## The Hook

Netdata is a monitoring agent you install on each server: it finds running services on its own and collects per-second metrics, with ready-made dashboards, alerts and anomaly detection out of the box.

## What's Good

GPL-3.0+ agent (netdata/netdata), release v2.12.1 (2026-10-08), commit on 2026-10-21. ★~81k (~116 a week). Runs on Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, Windows and Kubernetes. Useful when you want useful charts and alerts for a box in minutes, without building Prometheus and Grafana dashboards first.

## The Catch

Only the agent is GPL: the dashboard UI it ships is under Netdata's own NCUL1 license, free to use but not open source. Netdata Cloud is optional and has a free community tier, but the multi-node and team features (RBAC, centralized alerts) live there. If you need a fully open stack, pair the agent with Prometheus and Grafana instead of the bundled UI.

## Verdict

The fastest way to see what a server is doing; know that the UI is not open source.