Installing and Localizing Netdata: A Real‑Time Linux Performance Monitoring Tool

Netdata is a real‑time Linux performance monitoring tool that displays system and application metrics such as CPU, memory, disk I/O, and network activity through a fast, Flash‑free web interface built with a clean UI.

When promoting Netdata for Linux server monitoring, the biggest challenge was the lack of an official Chinese version, so a simple localization was performed using a feature provided by the author. The installation steps are straightforward and are outlined below.

Fork repository address:

https://github.com/Fhaohaizi/netdata

New Netdata Chinese localization installation tutorial:

Install dependencies (same as the original version).

Install Netdata (download the installation package from the forked GitHub repository).

Execute the script netdata-installer-zh.sh .

Normally the Netdata service restarts automatically; refresh the browser cache to see the localization effect.

As shown:

Original installation tutorial:

Install dependencies. The first line installs the basic set (excluding MySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL, named, hardware sensors, and SNMP). The second line installs all dependencies. curl -Ss 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/firehol/netdata-demo-site/master/install-required-packages.sh' >/tmp/kickstart.sh && bash /tmp/kickstart.sh -i netdata curl -Ss 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/firehol/netdata-demo-site/master/install-required-packages.sh' >/tmp/kickstart.sh && bash /tmp/kickstart.sh -i netdata-all

Install Netdata: git clone https://github.com/firehol/netdata.git --depth=1 cd netdata # Install ./netdata-installer.sh

Start the Netdata service: service netdata start

Afterwards, access http:// ip :19999/ to view Netdata's web page.

Netdata advantages:

Beautiful UI built on the Bootstrap framework.

Extremely fast and efficient: written in C, typically using only about 2% of a single‑core CPU and minimal memory.

Zero configuration: simply install and it automatically monitors all data.

Zero dependencies: static web files and a built‑in web server.

Metrics that can be monitored include:

CPU usage, interrupts, soft interrupts, and frequency (overall and per core).

RAM, swap, and kernel memory usage (including KSM and kernel memory deduplication).

Disk I/O (bandwidth, operations, fragmentation, utilization per disk).

IPv4 network statistics (packets, errors, fragmentation).

TCP connections, packets, errors, handshakes.

UDP packets and errors.

Broadcast and multicast bandwidth and packets.

Netfilter/iptables firewall events and errors.

Processes (running, blocked, forks, activity).

NFS file server activity.

Network Quality of Service metrics.

Applications grouped by process tree (CPU, memory, disk read/write, swap, threads, pipes, sockets, etc.).

Apache web server status (v2.2, v2.4).

MySQL databases (multiple servers, per‑instance bandwidth, queries/s, handlers, locks, problems, temporary tables, connections, binary logs, threads, InnoDB engine details).