Cut Infrastructure Monitoring Costs by 90% With True Real-Time Visibility

Yes, as your monitoring and alerting tool. Netdata excels at infrastructure and application monitoring, while AWS-specific service metrics (S3, Lambda, API Gateway, etc.) originate in CloudWatch: Netdata’s CloudWatch collector brings them into Netdata at CloudWatch’s resolution. We recommend running Netdata for infrastructure/application monitoring and collecting AWS-native service metrics from CloudWatch into the same dashboards. This approach delivers 90% cost savings while maintaining complete visibility.

Real customer results demonstrate 90% cost reduction compared to CloudWatch and similar cloud-native monitoring solutions. Examples include Motohunt achieving 90% reduction vs Stackdriver, Managed Server eliminating 100% of CloudWatch costs, and 7 Oaks Group reducing infrastructure spending by 50%. Netdata’s per-node pricing has no charges for metrics volume, System Logs Monitoring (querying logs in place), users, data retention or containers, and no hidden fees for API calls or custom metrics.

Infrastructure monitoring is priced per node: no charges for metrics volume, System Logs Monitoring (querying logs in place), users, data retention or containers, no per-dashboard or API query charges, and ML anomaly detection built in; Business includes AI conversations (fair use), and AI Investigations is an add-on. The infrastructure monitoring price is simple: nodes × the per-node price. See the pricing page for plan details.

Netdata’s distributed architecture processes data at the edge (each node independently), not in a central location. This enables 4.5+ billion metrics/second globally with no central bottleneck. Each Agent handles 3,000-20,000 metrics/second using <5% CPU and 150MB RAM (standalone, ML enabled) (scientifically validated as most energy-efficient). Linear scalability means adding nodes doesn’t affect existing performance - proven at 100,000+ node deployments.

No. Netdata uses <5% CPU and 150MB RAM per agent (standalone, ML enabled), scientifically validated by the University of Amsterdam (https://research.vu.nl/en/publications/an-empirical-evaluation-oftheenergy-andperformance-overhead-ofmon/) as the most energy-efficient monitoring solution. CloudWatch Agent can use 15-80% CPU with wildcards and suffers from goroutine memory leaks. Netdata is more efficient despite collecting more data because of its optimized architecture and intelligent resource management.

Netdata trains 18 unsupervised k-means models per metric using 6-hour training windows with 3-hour staggered intervals. Anomalies are flagged only when ALL 18 models agree (consensus-based), achieving 99% false positive reduction with a theoretical rate of 10^-36. Training happens automatically in the background as low-priority tasks, requiring no setup. Models retrain every 3 hours to adapt to changing patterns. Full ML confidence is achieved in approximately 2 days.

Yes. System Logs Monitoring queries systemd-journal (Linux), Windows Event Log (Windows) and macOS unified logs directly, with no pipeline, and Logs Management collects, stores and indexes logs from any source (syslog, Kubernetes, files, applications, cloud services) through the OpenTelemetry Collector into the Netdata log store. This eliminates Elasticsearch/Splunk infrastructure, achieving 90% cost reduction while fully evaluating the first 500,000 entries of a query, then sampling up to 1M. System Logs Monitoring (querying logs in place) is not billed and adds no storage; Logs Management comes with a generous included log quota.

Recommended approach: (1) Install Netdata on EC2 instances with one command, (2) Run both CloudWatch and Netdata in parallel to validate, (3) Shift alerting to Netdata for better accuracy and ML-based detection, (4) Shift dashboards to Netdata (automated, better), (5) Reduce CloudWatch to AWS-specific services only (S3, Lambda, etc.), (6) Realize 90% cost savings while improving visibility. Most customers complete this transition within 30 days.

Only if services require authentication (databases, message brokers, APIs with passwords). Otherwise, Netdata auto-discovers and monitors 800+ integrations automatically. No manual configuration for open endpoints. The system generates dashboards, trains ML models, and configures 1,100+ pre-configured alerts automatically, with dashboards as soon as data is collected.

Netdata has comprehensive Kubernetes support with DaemonSet deployment (agent per node), auto-discovery (pods, services, objects), container metrics (cgroups v1/v2), Kubernetes state monitoring, Helm chart available, and EKS/ECS/Fargate support. Installation takes minutes, and monitoring begins immediately with zero configuration required.

Netdata monitors everything uniformly. The same agent works on AWS, Azure, GCP, and on-premises. Unified dashboards work regardless of infrastructure location. No data egress charges because data stays local. 800+ integrations across all platforms provide comprehensive coverage. This is a key advantage over CloudWatch’s AWS-only ecosystem.

You do not need to. Netdata generates better dashboards automatically as soon as data is collected. Each Netdata chart provides analytical capability equivalent to 25+ Grafana charts. Most customers prefer Netdata’s automated dashboards over manually rebuilding CloudWatch dashboards because they’re more comprehensive, update automatically, and require zero maintenance.

Netdata supports strict compliance programs: SOC 2 Type 2 certified, data sovereignty (all data stays on-premises, and log data is not stored in Netdata Cloud), GDPR-aligned processing, HIPAA alignment (BAA available), PCI DSS aligned, role-based access control with a sensitive-data permission, encrypted transport, On-Premises Cloud option (air-gapped), and systemd-journal Forward Secure Sealing (FSS) for journal tamper detection. This makes Netdata ideal for regulated industries requiring data locality and audit trails.

Community Plan: Forum/Discord community support. Business Plan: Email/ticket support with SLA. Enterprise Plan: 24/7 support, dedicated team, phone support. On-Premises: Custom support agreements. All plans include comprehensive documentation at learn.netdata.cloud and active community engagement.

Netdata Cloud (SaaS) provides centralized dashboards, RBAC, SSO, and team collaboration with a 99.5% monthly availability commitment. Netdata Cloud On-Premises runs the entire control plane in your datacenter for air-gapped environments. Both options keep all observability data (metrics, logs and traces) on your infrastructure - only metadata travels to Cloud. Choose based on your connectivity and compliance requirements.

Yes. Netdata provides implementation assistance, architecture design, migration support, custom integrations, training programs, and consulting services. Contact sales@netdata.cloud for details on professional services packages tailored to your needs.

Netdata Cloud provides RBAC (role-based access control), Spaces (full isolation of nodes, Rooms, users, permissions, settings and billing per organization/customer), Rooms (logical isolation per team/service/incident), SSO (Okta, OpenID Connect), SCIM (user provisioning from your identity provider), and comprehensive audit logs for activity tracking.

Netdata ingests OpenTelemetry traces over OTLP on the same agent that collects your metrics and logs. Spans are stored and indexed on your own infrastructure, and the Traces tab in Netdata Cloud gives you a duration heatmap, filters by service, span name and duration, a full waterfall for every trace, and every span attribute your instrumentation recorded. AWS X-Ray and CloudWatch Application Signals add automatic instrumentation of AWS services such as Lambda and API Gateway; Netdata’s Traces explorer computes RED analysis (rate, errors, duration) at query time for any slice of traffic, with spans kept on your infrastructure. If your services already use OpenTelemetry SDKs, point them (or an OpenTelemetry Collector) at a Netdata Agent over OTLP/gRPC and the traces stay in your own environment. Learn more about Netdata distributed tracing.

Yes. The Netdata Agent is fully open source (GPLv3+) with 80,000+ GitHub stars and 1.5M daily downloads. Netdata Cloud provides additional features (centralized dashboards, RBAC, SSO) with free and paid tiers. You can run standalone Agents open source forever or upgrade to Cloud for team collaboration and enterprise features.

One command. Run a single-line command, and Netdata automatically discovers your infrastructure, generates dashboards, trains ML models, and starts monitoring. No configuration, no query languages, no manual dashboard building required. Dashboards appear as soon as data is collected.