We designed the Netdata Agent to be incredibly lightweight, even when it’s collecting a few thousand dimensions every second and visualizing that data into hundreds of charts. The Agent itself should never use more than 1% of a single CPU core, roughly 100 MiB of RAM, and minimal disk I/O to collect, store, and visualize all this data.
We take this scalability seriously. We have one user running Netdata on a system with 144 cores and 288 threads. Despite collecting 100,000 metrics every second, the Agent still only uses 9% CPU utilization on a single core.
But not everyone has such powerful systems at their disposal. For example, you might run the Agent on a cloud VM with only 512 MiB of RAM, or an IoT device like a Raspberry Pi. In these cases, reducing Netdata’s footprint beyond its already diminutive size can pay big dividends, giving your services more horsepower while still monitoring the health and the performance of the node, OS, hardware, and applications.
Read the rest of the Guide on Netdata Learn.