Deployment with Centralization Points

An observability centralization point can centralize both metrics and logs. The sending systems are called Children, while the receiving systems are called Parents.

When metrics and logs are centralized, the Children are never queried for metrics and logs. The Netdata Parents have all the data needed to satisfy queries.

• Metrics are centralized by Netdata, with a feature we call Streaming. The Parents listen for incoming connections and permit access only to Children that connect to it with the right API key. Children are configured to push their metrics to the Parents, and they initiate the connections to do so.

• Logs are centralized with methodologies provided by systemd-journald. This involves installing systemd-journal-remote on both the Parent and the Children, and configuring the keys required for this communication.

Feature	How it works
Unified infrastructure dashboards for metrics	Yes, at Netdata Cloud
Unified infrastructure dashboards for logs	All logs are accessible via the same dashboard at Netdata Cloud, although they are unified per Netdata Parent
Centrally configured alerts	Yes, at Netdata Parents
Centrally dispatched alert notifications	Yes, at Netdata Cloud
Data are exclusively on-prem	Yes, Netdata Cloud queries Netdata Agents to satisfy dashboard queries.

A configuration with 2 observability centralization points looks like this:

Netdata Cloud queries the Netdata Parents to provide aggregated dashboard views.

For alerts, the dispatch of notifications looks like in the following chart:

Active–Active Parent Deployment

For high availability, Parents can be configured to stream data for their Children between them, and keep their data sets in sync. Children are configured with the addresses of both Parents, but will only stream to one of them at a time. When one Parent becomes unavailable, the Child reconnects to the other. When the first Parent becomes available again, that Parent will catch up by receiving the backlog from the second.

With both Parent Agents connected to Netdata Cloud, it will route queries to either of them transparently, depending on their availability. Alerts trigger on either Parent will stream to Cloud, and Cloud will deduplicate and debounce state changes to prevent spurious notifications.

Configuration steps for deploying Netdata with Observability Centralization Points

For Metrics:

• Install Netdata Agents on all systems and the Netdata Parents.

• Configure stream.conf at the Netdata Parents to enable streaming access with an API key.

• Configure stream.conf at the Netdata Children to enable streaming to the configured Netdata Parents.

Check the related section in our documentation for more info.

For Logs:

• Install systemd-journal-remote on all systems and the Netdata Parents.

• Configure systemd-journal-remote at the Netdata Parents to enable logs reception.

• Configure systemd-journal-upload at the Netdata Children to enable transmission of their logs to the Netdata Parents.

Check the related section in our documentation for more info.