I am new to Netdata and assessing it for a monitoring tool, including a basic level of visibility and integration with out network designs. One feature, or element of a Node’s information, that I can’t see in Netdata Cloud are the actual IP addresses of network interfaces on the node - am I missing something obvious or is this data not actually collected?
When selecting a nodes general information the hostname is of course shown, and various metrics relating to network interfaces, IPv4 and IPv6, but no actual IP addresses assigned to the node.
Is it possible to find or expose this information so a node can be searched or selected by IP address?
Is this information available somewhere I just can’t see yet?
Welcome to our forums and thanks for raising this question with us.
At the moment, there isn’t any place where this information is displayed because we don’t collect it from the Node’s agent and pass it, as metadata, to the Cloud. We have this identified as a need, and it actually has been mentioned on the forums in the past- https://community.netdata.cloud/t/displaying-server-ip-address-on-netdata-cloud/66
We can’t yet tell when this will become available, since we have a couple of other things in front.
In the meantime, if you haven’t done it already, would editing the hostnames be any helpful? You can check how it is done here - Configure the Netdata Agent | Learn Netdata
As someone how has their roots in networking, and as we see the transformation of networks towards more automation and infrastructure-as-code, I would think this should become a very important attribute. You can understand a lot about infrastructure deployment if you have good IP address management.
As a slight tangent question then, are you able to select nodes to create custom dashboards, or filter views, based on host labels?
With this capability we could hopefully create some internal automation to add the IP address as label to the node via an API call. Or otherwise configure it manually as a label during node deployment and configuration.
For info as well, the link to the past forum discussion on “displaying-server-ip-address…” does not work anymore (perhaps not migrated to the new community platform).
I totally understand the need and it makes sense to have some sort of dynamic dashboards that based on some filtering rules would group/surface what you need.
At the moment we don’t have filtering by host labels but it is on our plans to enhance the global node filter to allow using host labels there and, most probably, allow to have saved views around it.
We will keep you posted on this.
Regarding the link I shared, I tried it with an incognito session and couldn’t open it as well - it seems to have been flagged as private, let me try to investigate on why.
I think I read somewhere that it is possible to create custom tags on nodes that will be exported to the parent. Perhaps a tag (maybe wrong name) can be used to indicate IP address?
@Forza - Thanks for the suggestion, and you correct from what I understand (I’ve not been able to test it in anger yet due to some deployment issues) that tags (host labels) are passed up to parent nodes and NetData cloud. And using a label to convey the IP would be an obvious workaround (please see earlier in the thread).
The issue that dashboards and views can NOT filter on labels at the moment. So I can use an IP-based label to find and select a node.
Regardless of putting an IP address in a label, the lack of searching and filtering on labels is probably a show-stopper for our requirements. And with various deployment issues I have had so far (elements of services just not running as documented) I have not progressed my assessment of NetData any further recently.
@hugo - any idea where this capability would sit on your development roadmap please?
You are right @garyh , the host labels are passed to Cloud but for now only shown for informational purposes and you can access them on the Node inspector section (pressing the i icon on Nodes tab or the Single Node view)
We are currently revisiting our filtering capabilities - not sure if you’ve seen our latest chart label filtering on composite charts - and adding the filtering for host labels is definitely on the list.
Unfortunately, don’t have an estimate for when this will be picked up yet, but since we are revisiting priorities for the rest of this year we may have some updates soon.
