Netdata Marketplace

Community Alerts

Netdata alerts are a critical piece of what makes Netdata so easy to use. It comes packaged with a large number of alerts about common use-cases, ready to be used with sane defaults. That makes Netdata to work out-of-the-box for most applications.

There are times though, that users create more advanced alerts about certain niche use-cases.

This directory is the home of all alerts that have been contributed by users, but are not added to the main netdata/netdata repository.

How to install an alert

To install a collector, you need to either visit the Netdata Marketplace (WIP) or visit the respective README inside the alerts directory.

The alert directory is structured in the same manner as the /collectors.

/alerts/<collector_plugin>/<collector>/

Inside every directory, there is a single README.md that has all the community-contributed alert definitions. So for example, if you want to add a community alert for geth, you will edit the following README: /alerts/go.d/geth/README.md.

To install an alert, you first have to find the alert definition inside the README file of the respective collector.

An alert definition looks like this:

template: 10min_cpu_usage
      on: system.cpu
      os: linux
   hosts: *
  lookup: average -10m unaligned of user,system,softirq,irq,guest
   units: %
   every: 1m
    warn: $this > (($status >= $WARNING)  ? (75) : (85))
    crit: $this > (($status == $CRITICAL) ? (85) : (95))
   delay: down 15m multiplier 1.5 max 1h
    info: average cpu utilization for the last 10 minutes (excluding iowait, nice and steal)
      to: sysadmin

Aftewards:

  1. Locate the directory where Netdata stores it’s configuration. For example: /etc/netdata/.
  2. Run `sudo /etc/netdata/edit-config health.d/<collector_name>. It will open a text editor, showing the default alerts that are already enabled for this data source.
  3. Paste the alert definition you copied from the README file
  4. Close the file
  5. Restart Netdata (e.g systemctl restart netdata) or runnetdatacli reload-health1orkillall -USR2 netdata`.

How to contribute an alert

Contributing a communtiy alert is very easy.

All alerts should be grouped by data source and be placed inside the README.md of that data source. If the data source does not exist, create a directory structure as follows:

`/alerts//<data_source>/README.md

Every README.md should have the following structure

## Data source title

### Alert title
<Description>
<Alert definition>

For a list of data sources and plugins, you can visit the following page on our documentation: How Netdata’s metrics collectors work.

Additional Resources

Community Collectors

Community collectors are extensions for Netdata that have been contributed by community members. The extend Netdata by enabling it to monitor various data sources, from Tor to hardware sensors.

As they are created and contributed by Community Members, Netdata does not maintain them. They are provided as-is and no support is provided. We can simply vouch that the collectors worked at the time of contribution.

Note that as APIs change all the time, it is very possible that some collectors may not work as expected.

Please do not use the community collectors in Production systems without testing them yourselves. We support users and companies to take “ownership” of community collectors that they found valuable and maintain them. By providing back the improvements that you make on the collectors,

How to install a collector WIP

How to contribute a collector

It’s very easy to contribute a collector.

  1. First read the Contributor’s Handbook.
  2. Follow the normal workflow, as outlined there, regarding collector contribution.
  3. Instead of doing the PR against the netdata/netdata repository, make the contribution in the netdata/community repository.
  4. Add the collector to the appropriate directory. The repository has the following structure: `/collectors/<collector_plugin>//.

Why contribute a collector here?

Community collecotrs are provided as-is, meaning that Netdata is not responsible for maintaining and supporting them. That means that the criteria for allowing a collector in this repository as much lower than those for allowing a collector to be added to the main repo.

Since we support/maintain the collectors that come packaged with Netdata, we are very strict regarding the code quality and the nature of the collector. We can’t take on supporting a collector about a more niche application, but the community can! Thus, the community is a perfect place to share the collectors that you have created for your specific use-case.

The only criteria for allowing a collector here is for the collector to work properly!

Additional Resources