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Netdata turned proprietary: keep it in DietPi?
🕑 Added 2025-08-01 22:43:05 +0000 UTC
Hey guys,
while reviewing our software options regarding support for the Debian 13 Trixie release on August 9th, I stumbled across Netdata, which has been removed from the Debian repositories.
Reasons are:
The project turned proprietary as Netdata Inc. company.
While the agent software, responsible for collecting the metric data, is still open source software, the web interface is closed source since Netdata v2, distributed as binary, and the agent does not support any alternatives.
Furthermore, according to Debian maintainers, the local web interface lost more and more features since its release, which were instead moved into the Netdata's cloud interface. To use it, one requires an account. For limited personal usage, it is free of costs, but has a price tag for professional use, and from a certain number of nodes or dashboards.
For reference:
Debian strictly separates free open source and non-free software in their APT repositories, and would require to ship the Netdata web interface via "non-free" APT component, and the agent via "contrib" (packages which depend on non-free software). And since there is no packaging separation in Netdata upstream code, doing so would require increasing efforts. So even when putting aside all ideological aspects, for Debian it made sense to drop support.
DietPi however supports other proprietary and closed source software options. So even if we do not like prior open source software to turn closed source, this alone is not a reason for us to push them out of our catalogue. Netdata is, as prior open source version as shipped by Debian Bookworm, the most installed standalone monitoring software, according to our survey stats. I did never actively use it outside of temporary test installs, but it is (or was) pretty feature-rich and modular. All other monitoring software we offer, is either for Raspberry Pi only, has less features or is less extensible, or we offer only individual parts of a full monitoring stack, e.g. Grafana or the Prometheus Node exporter.
Netdata hosts own APT repositories we could implement into dietpi-software, pre-configure it with disabled telemetry and in case tailor it a bit for local web UI and LAN-internal usage. But I am uncertain whether Netdata remains as popular as it currently is, whether the features of the local web interface are or remain good enough, or whether a significant number of users would create a Netdata cloud account, and in case pay for extended or professional usage.
An alternative would be to complement other popular FLOSS monitoring stacks, like adding a Prometheus server option, to combine with the Node exporter and e.g. Grafana, or a classic TIG stack: Telegraf - InfluxDB - Grafana. A goal would be to offer each component as standalone option, but offering to combine it with backend/frontend components, and configuring it accordingly OOTB, similar to how we offer and in case combine Pi-hole with Unbound.
What do you guys think?
If you currently use Netdata, would you switch to Netdata v2?
If you tried or switch to Netdata v2 already, is the local web interface still good enough for some efforts to keep it among our software options?
Comments
Kostas Mouratidis
I don't think I use Netdata, but if I did I'd definitely switch to a fully open alternative given what you said about them removing features. I've switched in past for tools I've used a lot, simply because they changed their license from MIT/Apache to something still open but more constrained.
Laurie K
I don't currently use Netdata.
