Hi @mbarper
Indeed, netdata user has no permissions to read files owned by root.
I am not a specialist, but i think we had pretty similar issue with filecheck collector, see Running Firefox as root in a regular user's session is not supported. ($HOME is /root which is owned by netdata.) · Issue #10205 · netdata/netdata · GitHub
We ended up with this solution go.d.plugin/modules/filecheck at master · netdata/go.d.plugin · GitHub
I hope it will help to resolve the problem!