Extremely disappointed by the removal of netData, please restore it!

[Dariusz1989]

Hey

This aint gonna be pretty but I'll try to "control"...

I have been using freenas for about 1-2 years now. I found it always a bit "tricky" given then heavy - "be an IT person to run it". But over time the GUI has become more "accessible" and the system with each release become more friendly and nice to use.

I'm using it as my home nas and small business solution. I mainly run 2 pools, some home data & work data.

Since the start of the system I always struggle to understand what feenas wasdoing. The old reporting tools very were slow, and using it for any sort of performance test was very bad. After some time, behold netData has arrived. I absolutely loved it. Getting heart-beat updates on per millisecond or however short that was was just brilliant. I was able to fine-tune a lot of the parameters thanks to it. Like how quickly the cache of arc was populating and all that & 10gbe tweaks. I also loved the front page, at the top I had all I needed, cpu usage/ in/ out transfers etc etc. The entire tool made my life a lot nicer. Getting status test was just bookmark away and I could sleep with peace.

Now behold I updated freenas to latest version seeing that wizard got added to replicator task and I was "Yea sweet, I'll add some backups & etc" and behold. NetData was gone! My 1st instinct was... no way, I must have disabled service or something. But no, its gone. DEAD. Because there was "memory error" somewhere... I'm not sure where as after running it for a year or so (I'm not quite sure how long...) I had 0 issues... so I dunno. I only had a good experience with netData - except for email notifications... If it was really that bad of a tool... well I don't understand it, it was a service we could just disable it :/ it was not even on by default! why rip it away ?!

In any case it was a terrible day for me. All the quick "is my nas OK" monitoring is gone. So I went on the forum... and behold we have TrueCommand! That does not update as fast as netData nor report on half of the stuff that netData did... not only that. I cant install it on as VM - mind my freenas is not 48core 12523623 gb ram rig. Its home solution with a little beef for business needs. So I cant have trueCommand as I can't install it on freeNas VM as all I get via vnc is black screen... even after I tried to force it ! - ongoing topic about installing it as vm > https://www.ixsystems.com/community/threads/how-to-install-on-freenas.82310/#post-569659

Brilliant! I'm left with native freenas monitoring tools which are terrible. I know they got updated from last one but dear lord... the GUI spacing and waste of space make it soo hard to monitor and understand the data... I mean... I'll stop myself here. ( I mean seriously I have 1-2 graph visible at once on the screen !!! I had 6+ on netData ! What sort of monitoring software creates graphs the size freeNas does?!?!!?!? !!!!!)

So bottom line. For a basic person that was using freenas for home-small office needs. Killing off netData is the worst thing that has ever happen to me while using freeNas.
I'm now forced to look in to some kind of paid services like SNMP that will never provide the speed of updates of netData or I have to use trueCommand which I CANT VM ON FREENAS !!!! So I have nothing.

I wish I would have gone with different software.

Thank you for supporting the "basic-home people".
Regards
Dariusz

 

[Kris Moore]

Hang tight. While we've posted the reasons for netdata to get taken out of the base, it wasn't our intention to leave it that way forever. It's on the TODO to add it back as a plug-in. Will be taking a look at rolling one here in the near future, if somebody else doesn't beat me to it ;)

 

[Dariusz1989]

Hang tight. While we've posted the reasons for netdata to get taken out of the base, it wasn't our intention to leave it that way forever. It's on the TODO to add it back as a plug-in. Will be taking a look at rolling one here in the near future, if somebody else doesn't beat me to it ;)

Hey

Thanks for quick late reply!

I've read about that too, and that there needs to be "some1 to make it a plugin" but my understanding is that it has to run as service or else the performance is low ? Not sure perhaps other post was misleading?

I'll hang... just :- (

Regards
Dariusz

 

[Kris Moore]

Running as a jail doesn't impact performance in any tangible way, jails are pretty much native performance, unlike running a VM. Anyway, sorry for the delay on this, I had hoped to have something ready last week, but we've been pretty busy around here also.

 

[Kris Moore]

FYI - Netdata plugin is in review for the community repo.

Initial commit of netdata plugin for community plugins. Light testing by kmoore134 · Pull Request #52 · ix-plugin-hub/iocage-plugin-index

so far, but appears that disk,memory,cpu and similar charts are all working properly Thank you for your submission to the FreeNAS community plugins repository! Please ensure the following guideline...

github.com

 

[Dariusz1989]

Sweet thank you! Will be watching it. But I went back to 11.2 & trying to fix my jails/plugins as none of them work from downgrading from 11.3

 

[Sea Monkeys1]

Kris,

How about for us TrueNas users?

 

[Kris Moore]

Kris,

How about for us TrueNas users?

We'll be taking a look at it for TrueNAS 11.3. We could potentially offer it as an unsupported Plugin in that case, but I would caution that TrueNAS is where we saw the most issues with Netdata. Specifically if you are running system with more drives, that's where we saw the biggest performance hit and memory leak. I think we saw an instance of Netdata using over 100G of memory at one point, which is obviously non-optimal :)

 

[Sea Monkeys1]

Kris,

We mostly keep the service off and only turn it on during troubleshooting issues or users report slow performance issues. I am guessing people were leaving it running in the background all the time?

 

[Yorick]

Sweet thank you! Will be watching it. But I went back to 11.2 & trying to fix my jails/plugins as none of them work from downgrading from 11.3

NAT in the config.json makes 11.2 unhappy. Roll back iocage snapshot would be an option, or go into the json and remove the nat parameter that 11.2 doesn’t understand

 

[Kris Moore]

Kris,

We mostly keep the service off and only turn it on during troubleshooting issues or users report slow performance issues. I am guessing people were leaving it running in the background all the time?

Yep, that's exactly what folks were doing. We had a large increase in support calls because folks were enabling netdata and walking away ;)

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Of course you want constant monitoring of all available metrics in your data centre in an enterprise environment. We feed tons of stuff into Kibana to have a birds eye view of a particular project for example. If you switch it on when you need it, it's too late in my experience. You get an increased frequency of complaints about "performance" --> you want the last two hours, not the state "now".

I still do not get the original rant, thogh. Why on earth would specifically "basic-home people" need constant watching and tweaking of things?

 

[Dariusz1989]

FYI - Netdata plugin is in review for the community repo.

Initial commit of netdata plugin for community plugins. Light testing by kmoore134 · Pull Request #52 · ix-plugin-hub/iocage-plugin-index

so far, but appears that disk,memory,cpu and similar charts are all working properly Thank you for your submission to the FreeNAS community plugins repository! Please ensure the following guideline...

github.com

I see NetData in "community" plugins, is that a "trusted" source of netData? Or should I wait for IXsystems one ? @Kris Moore

 

[jgreco]

Why on earth would specifically "basic-home people" need constant watching and tweaking of things?

Because they can. Which is fine. :)

Moderator note to the OP @Dariusz1989 - would you mind if we changed the thread title? I think it has become clear that it is a misrepresentation of what actually happened.

 

[Redcoat]

Moderator note to the OP @Dariusz1989 - would you mind if we changed the thread title? I think it has become clear that it is a misrepresentation of what actually happened.

Hear, hear!

 

[KevDog]

Old thread I know but there hasn't been a push to the netdata plugin in over 2 months. That leaves me with an impression this feature will be available whenever it gets there.

 

[SweetAndLow]

Old thread I know but there hasn't been a push to the netdata plugin in over 2 months. That leaves me with an impression this feature will be available whenever it gets there.

It's a community plugin. So you're welcome to make contributions.

 

[mistermanko]

Old thread I know but there hasn't been a push to the netdata plugin in over 2 months. That leaves me with an impression this feature will be available whenever it gets there.

What in your opinion is missing? I'm using it for a while now and find it quite good in what it is supposed to do.

 

[Dariusz1989]

Because they can. Which is fine. :)

Moderator note to the OP @Dariusz1989 - would you mind if we changed the thread title? I think it has become clear that it is a misrepresentation of what actually happened.

Hey

yes yes sorry for long reply... It was ab it of a rage post!

 

[jgreco]

yes yes sorry for long reply... It was ab it of a rage post!

Understood, of course. ;-) Thread renamed from "Removing netData is the biggest F-you to a home user I have ever seen."