It auto-detects many programs like docker, nginx and postgresql and automatically creates dashboards for them. It also has many dashboards about system internals I didn't even know were great to monitor, so it taught me a lot. For example, seeing a CPU pinned at 100% processing interrupts because of a network interface overload or having time frames with high IOwait during a SQL query clearly meaning there's some larger seq scans happening.

You also needed zero configuration, no login, etc.

Then they added multi-instance monitoring purely client side - the browser remembers other instance domains and links between them - pretty neat and completely uninvasive.

Then they introduced their cloud login, where you can monitor multiple instances remotely/together. They had a `--no-cloud` flag though if you did not want it. But by now they've removed that flag and they say patching out the cloud functionality is bypassing their license [1]. Some functionality is locked behind premium upgrades, and you get prevented from adding more than N metrics or M instances. It's still _possible_ to use netdata without going through their cloud but you have to go through a nag window every time you try to open the local UI. It's clear they don't want you to use it anymore, and I don't really feel comfortable about their default auto-updating local install any more either.

Now it's still impressive and useful, but it's much more an enterprise focusued tool than an "i have this server i want to monitor" tool.

Of course I understand they need to make money, but what used to be trivial to understand (hooks into everything in your system it can and opens a single port to display it) has become a whole huge integrated ecosystem and for me personally it's competing in the space where I'd probably rather spend the time to make a proper Prometheus/Grafana setup instead.

[1] https://github.com/netdata/netdata/discussions/17594#discuss...