suddenly - Local dashboard is limited to 5 nodes

We run about 12 nodes streaming to a central one, no Cloud.

All of a sudden, when I access the Web UI on 19999 on the central node, I see all the node names, but no graphs. If I hover over one of the hostnames I get “Locked! Local dashboard is limited to 5 nodes”. 1 of the nodes DOES show up, and I can navigate to it, etc. But only 1, not 5.

This was working yesterday, 2025-01-14. I see from my yum logs that an update arrived on 2025-01-08, but this was working yesterday.

Is this the correct behavior all of a sudden?

just add /v3 at the end of the url

Not the same problem I’m having, but it appears to be the solution. Thanks!

@EdSchernau it will stop working soon. While it was originally intended to work with Netdata v2.0 (as announced in August), a bug prevented its functionality. The issue has been resolved as of yesterday.

Thanks, so what is the right solution? I’m not using any cloud features, this is a purely local instance.

Individual node dashboards are accessible for viewing. When directly accessing a Parent node’s dashboard, its Child nodes appear locked, but this should be changed - users should be able to click any Child node to view its single node view (but this is my personal opinion, can’t say it will be changed for sure). The limit should be applied for aggregation in the Metrics tab.

Thanks, so what is the right solution?

If you don’t want to subscribe to a paid plan - to stay on Netdata v2.1.1 (Parent) and use /v3 endpoint.

To minimize system resource usage, all of my child nodes are configured with:

[web]
    mode = none

[health]
    enabled = no   # Health monitoring/alerting performed on parent
 
[db]
    mode = ram
    retention = 1800  # keep 30 minutes of data in memory in case of disconnect from parent
 
[logs]
    health = none
    daemon = none
    collector = none
    debug = none
    access = none

so “Individual node dashboards are accessible for viewing” is not applicable.

Also, does this mean that now there is no health monitoring/alerting except for the 5 nodes I select?!

How do I downgrade to a version that will restore the previous functionality and disable auto-updates?

1 Like

Same question. How to downgrade?
In the meantime, stick to V1 and remove autoupdates.
…and start looking for another monitoring solution :slight_smile:
Any sugestions?

Hi,

I asked in https://community.netdata.cloud/t/concerned-about-the-future-of-netdata-forced-sso-cloud/5771/2:

  • will major features be cut from the Free and Open-Source Software Netdata agent as a result of pricing/subscription model changes?

And was not given a clear answer. Now this change makes it obvious that features that are present in the FOSS version of netdata are actively being removed.

This also affects the global alerts tab, there is no longer a way to display all active alerts at once.

This is unbelievable.

Are there plans to revert this change?

Can you provide more details? Your setup and problem (screenshot)?

Not sure if nodiscc is talking about the same thing, but this is the type of issue I’m now experiencing:


I don’t have any filters active. There is an active warning, but it’s on a “locked” node — so it says “There are no results”.

And if I go to the Nodes menu and manually find the node with the warning, I get:

This node is locked, so you can’t see the full alert details. Upgrade for no limitations!

Hi @ilyam8 the problem is exactly as eddyg described, the aggregated Alerts tab only shows alerts from the 5 unlocked nodes.

My setup is a few dozen nodes streaming to a parent. No cloud functionality involved.

This is a core functionality of the program, I can’t believe it was taken away. Are there plans to revert this change?

1 Like

I’ve bought the homelab annual license purely to support the project. But such rug pull make me doubt I’ll renew. Attract, then Extract. Why am I still surprised every time that it happens?

Hi there, I’m the founder of Netdata.

I’m glad to see how passionate you are about Netdata! This is great!

Netdata is undergoing significant development and transformation. We’re building a platform to streamline and simplify operations while maintaining - and even improving - its core strengths: real-time, low latency, cost efficiency, advanced machine learning, automation, and much more.

Multi-node dashboards weren’t part of the open-source Netdata; they were only available through our commercial offering, Netdata Cloud. We pushed hard to integrate the closed-source Netdata Cloud dashboard into the agent and make features like: highly scalable parent nodes, machine learning with unsupervised anomaly detection, and the ‘Top’ functions, available in the open-source version.

Before this update, those features were exclusive to the commercial product.

The absence of limitations on the agent dashboard was actually a bug. The limits intended for the Netdata Cloud Community tier were mistakenly not applied to it. It took us some time to identify and fix this issue.

That said, I want to remind you that the new dashboard (even with these limits) is far superior to the previous version. NIDL framework for slicing and dicing the data without learning query languages, anomaly detection everywhere, multi-instance charts and many more. This dashboard is also under active development and many more free features are coming to it.

So, despite these hiccups, we are happy that you now have access to this enhanced dashboard as part of the open-source Netdata experience.

So, as far as we can tell, all these was about giving more to the community, for free, not to take anything back.

2 Likes

All I want to be able to do is

  1. view all of my individual (child) nodes individually
  2. receive and view alerts for all of my nodes

I don’t need to see all the nodes on the “combined” Nodes tab, I don’t need the Top or Logs tabs (I wish those could be hidden, actually, since I don’t use cloud), etc.

As I noted above, the web UI is disabled on all my child nodes, so going to them directly is not a viable workaround.

I want to remind you that the new dashboard (even with these limits) is far superior to the previous version.

No, the limit of 5 nodes severely outweighs any benefits. I’d much rather have access to and alerting from all my individual nodes if that meant losing the ability to see a combined Metrics tab, or to “slice and dice the data without learning a query language”, “multi-instance charts”, etc.

For now, I am using the “local-custom-dashboard” with various metrics I want to see, since (for now) this functionality still allows me to create graphs from — and grouped by — all my nodes. But I do worry that this is also a “bug” that will be “fixed”…

Somehow, this issue has manifested again.
Does anyone know how to install a specific version? for instance specifying “–install-version 2.1.0” runs, then fails because it can’t find a package named ‘netdata-2.1.0.x86_64’.

Whats the right incantation on the install script command line?

@EdSchernau I was wondering why you marked the earlier reply as the Solution since it says “it will stop working soon” — as far as I know, there isn’t a solution