Parents: Your Centralization Points
Parents are Netdata Agents that collect and store data from other Agents ("Children"). They act as centralization points for your observability data.
How It Works
- You designate some Agents as Parents - Configure them to receive streaming data
- Children stream their data to Parents - They push metrics continuously
- Parents store and process everything - All metrics and logs from all Children
- You access Parents for dashboards and alerts - Centralized monitoring interface
- Cloud queries Parents when configured - Reduces load on production systems
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Parents give you centralized collection with distributed architecture benefits.
What Parents Do
Parents are specialized Netdata installations that you can configure to receive, store, and process observability data (metrics and logs) from multiple other systems in your infrastructure.
These Parents give you several core functions:
- Receiving and storing metrics and logs from multiple systems
- Processing and analyzing your collected data
- Running health checks and alerts
- Providing unified dashboards across all your systems
- Replicating data for your historical analysis
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This distributed yet centralized approach gives you the benefits of both decentralized collection and centralized analysis.
Why Use Parents
Use Case | Description | Benefits |
---|---|---|
Ephemeral Systems | Ideal for your Kubernetes nodes or temporary VMs that frequently go offline | You retain metrics and logs for analysis and troubleshooting even after node termination |
Limited Resources | Offloads observability tasks from your systems with low disk space, CPU, RAM, or I/O bandwidth | Your production systems run efficiently without performance trade-offs |
Multi-Node Dashboards Without Netdata Cloud | Aggregates data from all your nodes for centralized dashboards | You get Cloud-like functionality in environments that prefer or require on-premises solutions |
Restricted Netdata Cloud Access | Acts as a bridge when your monitored systems can't connect to Netdata Cloud | You can still use Cloud features despite firewall restrictions or security policies |