Well at first things worked as expected.
I understood cloud/user/login/... were somewhat restricted to paying users,
so went for the CLI Parent/Child setup.
That initially went right, until:
"the node win10 is locked. Windows agent is not supported"
This is deliberate obstruction, goes together with enshittification and bloat, and promises nothing good for the future.
So I will keep it for a while, but the goal is to replace it with something that lets me learn as a homelabber, to one-day propose it to business.
I give this project 3 years tops until its enterprise enshittification takes over and the open source community that helped build this project is left in the dust.
I really wanted to love Netdata. I was so excited at the idea of a self-hosted zero config, and instantly useful tool. The idea of setting up Grafana, storage backend(s), agents to collect metrics/logs and send them to the backend(s), and ultimately still have to build dashboards myself from scratch wasn't particularly appealing for someone who's just trying to monitor a local air-gapped host.
But once I started getting into the weeds of this tool a little bit more, my excitement quickly faded into disappointment.
It’s frustrating to discover that the once-celebrated open-source experience is slowly being carved away piece by piece. The product still works, but the direction is hard to ignore: features migrating behind cloud services for "security" (no one's buying your bullshit here, folks. The self-hosted community does not need you telling us how to secure our systems), drastically neutering the number of hosts that you can monitor on the community edition, and a strong push for paid licensing.
What was positioned as a powerful, transparent, community-driven monitoring stack now feels like it’s being steered toward the same corporate pattern we’ve seen time and time again: “free” until you want the features that actually make it worth using.
And here’s the part that stings the most: Netdata could have been a real Grafana competitor. Netdata is simple where Grafana is complex and automatic where Grafana demands configuration.
A genuine alternative for people who want great observability without turning it into a part-time job.
This project will not become a Grafana-killer by continuing down this path.
But at least the project owners will likely end up getting a fat paycheck in a few years when some corporation buys it up and turns it into a completely pay-to-play system.
Looks like I'm off to set up Grafana and fluentbit after all.
