Learn how to – How to Install Netdata on FreeBSD 12

Learn how to – How to Install Netdata on FreeBSD 12.

This guide will walk you through the installation of Netdata on FreeBSD 12. Netdata is a powerful distributed, real-time health and performance monitoring tool used for infrastructure systems and various applications. Netdata is one of the best real-time monitoring tools which works with Virtual Machines, physical servers, containers, and IoT devices. It gives you modern interactive web dashboards for viewing your server metrics.

Features of netdata

Below are some netdata features.

• Auto-scaling of chart units
• IP access lists for filtering access to netdata
• Enhanced VMs and containers monitoring
• Highlighted time-frames across all charts of the dashboard
• Dashboard snapshots, for loading/saving of selected time-frames
• Timezone conversion at the dashboard to allow comparing charts with server logs
• Zero maintenance, configuration, and dependencies
• It is easily customizable, extensible, and embeddable
• Scales to infinity
• Time-series back-ends supported – it can archive its metrics on graphite, opentsdb, Prometheus, JSON document DBs, in the same or lower detail.

Install Netdata on FreeBSD 12

With FreeBSD, two methods are available for installing Netdata – from ports or packages collection. In this guide, we will install Netdata on FreeBSD 12 from binary packages collection.

First, update your packages index.

$ sudo pkg update
Updating FreeBSD repository catalogue…
FreeBSD repository is up to date.
All repositories are up to date.

Then install Netdata on FreeBSD system.

# pkg install netdata
 Updating FreeBSD repository catalogue…
 FreeBSD repository is up to date.
 All repositories are up to date.
 The following 4 package(s) will be affected (of 0 checked):
 New packages to be INSTALLED:
     netdata: 1.11.1_2
     bash: 4.4.23_1
     e2fsprogs-libuuid: 1.44.5
     pkgconf: 1.5.4,1
 Number of packages to be installed: 4
 The process will require 15 MiB more space.
 3 MiB to be downloaded.
 Proceed with this action? [y/N]: y

After the installation, start the service and set it to start on system boot.

# sysrc netdata_enable="YES"
netdata_enable:  -> YES

Start netdata service

# /usr/local/etc/rc.d/netdata start
Starting netdata.

Check if you have port 19999 listening.

# sockstat -4 -6 | grep 19999
 netdata  netdata    1321  3  tcp4   127.0.0.1:19999       :

From the output, you can confirm it is listening on localhost IP 127.0.0.1. Let’s change this to server IP.

sudo vim /usr/local/etc/netdata/netdata.conf

Change bind to to the Server IP Address.

[global]
         # hostname = %%HOSTNAME%%
         history = 86400
         bind to = 192.168.1.10
         disconnect idle web clients after seconds = 3600

You can also bind to all interfaces using 0.0.0.0, restart netdata after making the change.

# /usr/local/etc/rc.d/netdata restart
Stopping netdata.
Waiting for PIDS: 1565.
Starting netdata.

Read through the configuration file /usr/local/etc/netdata/netdata.conf to customize your Monitoring experience.

Access Netdata Web dashboard on server IP address and port 19999.

If you’re a fan of Grafana, check our tutorial on How to Monitor Linux Server with Netdata and Grafana.