Install Netdata on pfSense CE

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This document is maintained by Netdata's community, and may not be completely up-to-date. Please double-check the details of the installation process, such as version numbers for downloadable packages, before proceeding.

You can help improve this document by submitting a PR with your recommended improvements or changes. Thank you!

Install prerequisites/dependencies

To install Netdata on pfSense, first enable the FreeBSD package repo Then run the following command (within a shell or under the Diagnostics/Command prompt within the pfSense web interface).

pkg install -y pkgconf bash e2fsprogs-libuuid libuv nano

Then run the following commands to download various dependencies from the FreeBSD repository.

pkg install json-c-0.15_1
pkg install py39-certifi-2023.5.7
pkg install py39-asn1crypto
pkg install py39-pycparser
pkg install py39-cffi
pkg install py39-six
pkg install py39-cryptography
pkg install py39-idna
pkg install py39-openssl
pkg install py39-pysocks
pkg install py39-urllib3
pkg install py39-yaml

⚠️ If any of the above commands return a Not Found error, you need to manually search for the latest package in the FreeBSD repository or by running pkg search. Search for the package's name, such as py37-cffi, find the latest version number, and update the command accordingly.

⚠️ On pfSense 2.4.5, Python version 3.7 may be installed by the system, in which case you should should not install Python from the FreeBSD repository as instructed above.

⚠️ If you are using the apcupsd collector, you need to make sure that apcupsd is up before starting Netdata. Otherwise a infinitely running cat process triggered by the default activated apcupsd charts plugin will eat up CPU and RAM (/tmp/.netdata-charts.d-*/run-*). This also applies to OPNsense.

Install Netdata

You can now install Netdata from the FreeBSD repository.

pkg install netdata

⚠️ If the above command returns a Not Found error, you need to manually search for the latest version of Netdata in the FreeBSD repository. Search for netdata, find the latest version number, and update the command accordingly.

You must edit /usr/local/etc/netdata/netdata.conf and change bind to = 127.0.0.1 to bind to = 0.0.0.0.

To start Netdata manually, run service netdata onestart.

Visit the Netdata dashboard to confirm it's working: http://<pfsenseIP>:19999

To start Netdata automatically every boot, add service netdata onestart as a Shellcmd entry within the pfSense web interface under Services/Shellcmd. You'll need to install the Shellcmd package beforehand under System/Package Manager/Available Packages. The Shellcmd Type should be set to Shellcmd.
Alternatively more information can be found in https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Installing_FreeBSD_Packages, for achieving the same via the command line and scripts.

If you experience an issue with /usr/bin/install being absent in pfSense 2.3 or earlier, update pfSense or use a workaround from https://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/6643

Note: In pfSense, the Netdata configuration files are located under /usr/local/etc/netdata.