I have been using Netdata with the basic IP restriction and/or reverse-proxy based authentication for years without problem, and this solution is ideal for me. I have no absolutely no interest in mandatory cloud-based features, especially for something as critical as authentication.
I need my monitoring system to keep working even in the absence of Internet connectivity. I have been pushing netdata as the monitoring tool of choice at $work, and even though it never lead to paid susbcriptions, I pushed the idea of using the cloud-based offering for a select set of hosts where added cloud features would be beneficial (“war rooms”, persistent custom dashboards, click-based alert configuration). Other than very limited set of use cases, the cloud-based model only adds drawbacks for my/our use cases.
Companies I work/worked at were never opposed to the idea of financial or other contributions to netdata (I wrote a few community docs and collectors myself), but the current paid subscription model doesn’t cut it ($5/node?? there are sometimes 100+ ephemeral nodes up at $work, even in my modest homelab I sometimes have up to 30 nodes)… My current parent-child streaming setup works beautifully and I hope this will not be rendered useless.
So I’s like to bring this discussion to the community forum, with the deepest respect and admiration for the Netdata team and software:
will cloud subscription or accounts become mandatory in the future to use the Netdata agent?
will major features be cut from the Free and Open-Source Software Netdata agent as a result of pricing/subscription model changes?
have you considered other subscription models and are there other ways a company or individual could help sustain the project financially or otherwise?
First of all thank you for being a long time user and for taking the time to send this thoughtful message.
Signing in to Netdata Cloud will not be mandatory in the Netdata v2.0 release. There will be a way for open source users to proceed without authenticating. The default flow will however be to take the user to the sign in option, where there will also be the option to proceed unauthenticated. Signed in or not - you will see the same dashboard, of course some features may be limited for non-signed in users.
We understand that you (and a lot of other users) need a monitoring solution that works without the Internet, and in air gapped situations. Netdata Cloud can in its entirety be run on-prem locally by you (Netdata Cloud On-Prem | Learn Netdata) - yes this requires setting up and maintaining a K8s cluster and the dependencies that Netdata Cloud will require but it gives you full control and there will not be any requirement of Internet Connectivity. We also realize that your infrastructure might be small enough that going through the extra work required to run a K8s cluster just to host Netdata may not be feasible - for scenarios such as this we are working on an alternative solution. This could end up being an “enterprise” version of the Netdata agent or a “light” version of the On-Prem solution, we have not finalized the design yet, but for sure we do not want to leave users in this niche without a way forward to get the best of Netdata.
We do NOT want to be yet another company making observability expensive and inaccessible. Our pricing has been kept simple (just the one variable - nodes) to cater to the majority of use-cases, however if you have a niche use-case and the current pricing model doesn’t make sense for you, we would be happy to have a discussion with you and figure out a way forward. This is also the reason why our homelab plan comes at a flat rate of 10$/month or 90$/year irrespective of the number of nodes. We are also considering introducing tiered pricing depending on the infra being monitored to offer more equitable pricing for smaller infrastructures.
For Netdata, the company, the project and the product - what we need to be successful is more users, especially for our paid products (netdata cloud, netdata on-prem, and the upcoming netdata enterprise agent). We do NOT want to limit the core monitoring experience for ANY of the users - and having a sustainable and successful product will allow us to keep doing this. And finally, what Netdata needs (besides users and subscribers) is for people who do like using the product and have got value from it to continue to spread the word and in doing so make it more likelier that enterprises are more likely to adopt Netdata.
If you’d like to continue the conversation, it would be great if we can have hop on a quick call or have an email discussion. You can reach me at product @ netdata dot cloud.