apologies i'm not sure if this should go under the cloud project or this one, but while there's some overlap, i presume most of this is implemented as default UI on netdata itself..
anyway I've been a long time user of netdata since the "classic UI days" (what i was quite used to, that is now only accessible at host:19999/v1).. when the new UI came around, i really didn't care for the redesign, and it sadly became the default some time around 1.41.x, but fortunately there was still a /v1 fallback i could escape the change. i've come to rely on since several times i used to have issues trying to get netdata cloud registration to even work (another story).
anyway i thought, ok it's now almost 2025 maybe the netdata-cloud registration issues have been sorted out (yes, they seem to now be), and i can give the cloud features a try, so i got my handful of hosts registered and.... the UI still ~sucks~^H^H^H^H^H has room for improvement :-) seems i'm not the only one (tons of people complaining on #15640 )
first, when i select to get to the front page of netdata, and it will "harasses" me if i want to try netdata-cloud, so i finally give up and say ok let's give it a shot finally..
i've connected my hosts up and when i elect to go to the "new dashboard", perhaps since i'm logged into netcloud, it just redirects me back to the netdata front page i was on and re-harasses me about viewing the host on the netdata cloud again.. if i relent and click-ON remember my choice, oh boy well then it just goes into a fun redirect-loop endlessly 🤦
...and now i can't even load the /v1 endpoint anymore! This endpoint should really be excluded from that infernal modal popup.. i want to stay on the agent dashboard damn it, there are far more datapoints available there! netdata cloud has (understandably) limited endpoints being pushed up so let me decide if/when i want to instead of harassing me each time!
anyway so now i need to go and clear my cookies to be able to use the agent dashboard again.. Great, i did that and can now tell you why i much prefer the old UI (and why i instinctively tack on '/v1/' at the end of the url):
complaints about the new netdata UI:
the old UI had a nice overview at the top, the new one tries to do something similar, but it shows unnecessary sections not applicable for when viewing only one host, and that can't be eliminated
so i thought, ok well maybe i can rearrange or resize these top sections to be less intrusive and let me see more of the actual graphs netdata is famous for, but when trying to 'drag and drop' the top two set of indicators, they just snap back to the same place they were.. and resizing them kinda works.. however i notice that they will jump up and down when they overlap vertically with another one, it's like the left edge of each indicator isn't changeable, very frustrating and unintuitive behaviour.. for example, imagine i want to change the order of the total disk reads and the total disk writes:
when you load the tab up, it shows you more of the graphs, but it still shows you the bottom of the last row of indicators.. i ended up dragging these around not knowing what they were one time before realizing that i screwed them up since they are resizing secretly with only a few pixel being shown
so sections on the right side-bar can't be collapsed. you click on the > expecting to collapse it, but this does nothing.. the only way to collapse is to click on another section (!).. this is highly non-standard, i should be able to at-will expand several sections, and collapse other ones so i can jump back and forth easily instead of requiring multiple clicks to get through to the desired section.. here you see the "Processes" section "stuck" open (i can't collapse it, it always stays open, others close if i open other ones.. just inconsistent behaviour here):
when looking at the Nodes tab, i don't see an immediately obvious way to rearrange the order of nodes? It appears to be shown in alphabetical order, but it would be nice if i could change them order of the hosts or group them differently, or at the very least, collapse some lines with a node
add new metrics to the Nodes tab, the context drop down should be alphabetical (that way they are at least grouped properly)
also in this tab, view does not resize in both directions?? it will resize expanding the window horizontally, but when contracting the window, it leaves the content cut off:
nodes sidebar, seems to suggest the node can be expanded further since there's a > next to it, but clicking on the > nothing happens..
also some places in the UI you use > and some places you use v
anyway the list goes on and on, i understand this is an open source project and progress can only move so fast, but i think with the amount of years that this UI has been around, these things could be done better (and i would love to help if i knew JS but i don't, so i am unfortunately only able to complain rather than properly contribute.. apologies for the grumbling).
also in case the CI folks aren't aware, the CI is also rather broken. this is the second issue i opened here, and for each one i get the following email:
Bug description
apologies i'm not sure if this should go under the cloud project or this one, but while there's some overlap, i presume most of this is implemented as default UI on netdata itself..
anyway I've been a long time user of netdata since the "classic UI days" (what i was quite used to, that is now only accessible at
host:19999/v1
).. when the new UI came around, i really didn't care for the redesign, and it sadly became the default some time around 1.41.x, but fortunately there was still a /v1 fallback i could escape the change. i've come to rely on since several times i used to have issues trying to get netdata cloud registration to even work (another story).anyway i thought, ok it's now almost 2025 maybe the netdata-cloud registration issues have been sorted out (yes, they seem to now be), and i can give the cloud features a try, so i got my handful of hosts registered and.... the UI still ~sucks~^H^H^H^H^H has room for improvement :-) seems i'm not the only one (tons of people complaining on #15640 )
first, when i select to get to the front page of netdata, and it will "harasses" me if i want to try netdata-cloud, so i finally give up and say ok let's give it a shot finally..
i've connected my hosts up and when i elect to go to the "new dashboard", perhaps since i'm logged into netcloud, it just redirects me back to the netdata front page i was on and re-harasses me about viewing the host on the netdata cloud again.. if i relent and click-ON
remember my choice
, oh boy well then it just goes into a fun redirect-loop endlessly 🤦Here's how that looks:
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/bc5e3295-d4fe-49c5-8579-9204bf740744
...and now i can't even load the /v1 endpoint anymore! This endpoint should really be excluded from that infernal modal popup.. i want to stay on the agent dashboard damn it, there are far more datapoints available there! netdata cloud has (understandably) limited endpoints being pushed up so let me decide if/when i want to instead of harassing me each time!
anyway so now i need to go and clear my cookies to be able to use the agent dashboard again.. Great, i did that and can now tell you why i much prefer the old UI (and why i instinctively tack on '/v1/' at the end of the url):
complaints about the new netdata UI:
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/a01682d8-c0c7-4d75-bdf2-5f1766717426
>
expecting to collapse it, but this does nothing.. the only way to collapse is to click on another section (!).. this is highly non-standard, i should be able to at-will expand several sections, and collapse other ones so i can jump back and forth easily instead of requiring multiple clicks to get through to the desired section.. here you see the "Processes" section "stuck" open (i can't collapse it, it always stays open, others close if i open other ones.. just inconsistent behaviour here):https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/ac517a6c-8bef-4f2f-9726-de1a69355607
when looking at the
Nodes
tab, i don't see an immediately obvious way to rearrange the order of nodes? It appears to be shown in alphabetical order, but it would be nice if i could change them order of the hosts or group them differently, or at the very least, collapse some lines with a nodeadd new metrics to the
Nodes
tab, the context drop down should be alphabetical (that way they are at least grouped properly)https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/f19277ef-dd16-494b-8c7f-69e934128d1c
nodes sidebar, seems to suggest the node can be expanded further since there's a > next to it, but clicking on the > nothing happens..
also some places in the UI you use > and some places you use v
anyway the list goes on and on, i understand this is an open source project and progress can only move so fast, but i think with the amount of years that this UI has been around, these things could be done better (and i would love to help if i knew JS but i don't, so i am unfortunately only able to complain rather than properly contribute.. apologies for the grumbling).
Expected behavior
a good UI experience would be nice :-)
Steps to reproduce
Installation method
kickstart.sh
System info
Netdata build info
Additional info
time=2024-10-14T12:33:29.419+01:00 comm=netdata source=collector level=error errno="13, Permission denied" tid=2200109 msg="Runtime directory '/var/cache/netdata' is not writable, falling back to '/tmp'" time=2024-10-14T12:33:29.421+01:00 comm=netdata source=daemon level=error errno="13, Permission denied" tid=2200109 msg="Cannot open log file '/var/log/netdata/collectors.log'. Leaving fd 2 as-is." time=2024-10-14T12:33:29.421+01:00 comm=netdata source=daemon level=error errno="13, Permission denied" tid=2200109 msg="Cannot open log file '/var/log/netdata/daemon.log'. Falling back to stderr." time=2024-10-14T12:33:29.421+01:00 comm=netdata source=daemon level=error errno="13, Permission denied" tid=2200109 msg="System info script /usr/libexec/netdata/plugins.d/system-info.sh not found." Packaging: Netdata Version ____ : v1.47.0 Installation Type __ : custom Package Architecture _ : unknown Package Distro ___ : unknown Configure Options __ : dummy-configure-command Default Directories: User Configurations ____ : /etc/netdata Stock Configurations ____ : /usr/lib/netdata/conf.d Ephemeral Databases (metrics data, metadata) : /var/cache/netdata Permanent Databases ____ : /var/lib/netdata Plugins ____ : /usr/libexec/netdata/plugins.d Static Web Files : /usr/share/netdata/web Log Files __ : /var/log/netdata Lock Files __ : /var/lib/netdata/lock Home __ : /var/lib/netdata Operating System: Kernel : Kernel Version __ : Operating System : Operating System ID ____ : Operating System ID Like : Operating System Version : Operating System Version ID ____ : Detection __ : Hardware: CPU Cores __ : CPU Frequency __ : RAM Bytes __ : Disk Capacity __ : CPU Architecture _____ : Virtualization Technology __ : Virtualization Detection _ : Container: Container __ : Container Detection ____ : Container Orchestrator ____ : none Container Operating System : Container Operating System ID __ : Container Operating System ID Like : Container Operating System Version : Container Operating System Version ID __ : Container Operating System Detection _ : �PX���>��6L��/�HF��Hl�(��_Fd;gE[%���_Fyq.�c�J�
F�h�(�E~�8a�^f�e�aF��$��aF��R�O�b/
bF|h�����bF �n&��0cF��He)���H�s���|�����z8�> Z�h��h��@�G ���_SOURCE_MONOTONIC_TIMESTAMP=251993204830�#�m�)n$�ݗ�:B�lv��O����Q�:��Features: Built For ____ : Linux Netdata Cloud __ : YES Health (trigger alerts and send notifications) ___ : YES Streaming (stream metrics to parent Netdata servers) _ : YES Back-filling (of higher database tiers) ____ : YES Replication (fill the gaps of parent Netdata servers) __ : YES Streaming and Replication Compression __ : YES (zstd gzip) Contexts (index all active and archived metrics) ____ : YES Tiering (multiple dbs with different metrics resolution) : YES (5) Machine Learning ___ : YES Database Engines: dbengine (compression) _ : YES (zstd) alloc __ : YES ram ____ : YES none ___ : YES Connectivity Capabilities: ACLK (Agent-Cloud Link: MQTT over WebSockets over TLS) _ : YES static (Netdata internal web server) : YES h2o (web server) ____ : YES WebRTC (experimental) __ : NO Native HTTPS (TLS Support) __ : YES TLS Host Verification __ : YES Libraries: LZ4 (extremely fast lossless compression algorithm) ____ : NO ZSTD (fast, lossless compression algorithm) ____ : YES zlib (lossless data-compression library) : YES Brotli (generic-purpose lossless compression algorithm) : NO protobuf (platform-neutral data serialization protocol) : YES (system) OpenSSL (cryptography) _____ : YES libdatachannel (stand-alone WebRTC data channels) __ : NO JSON-C (lightweight JSON manipulation) _ : YES libcap (Linux capabilities system operations) __ : YES libcrypto (cryptographic functions) ____ : YES libyaml (library for parsing and emitting YAML) ____ : YES libmnl (library for working with netfilter) ____ : YES Plugins: apps (monitor processes) ____ : YES cgroups (monitor containers and VMs) : YES cgroup-network (associate interfaces to CGROUPS) : YES proc (monitor Linux systems) ____ : YES tc (monitor Linux network QoS) ____ : YES diskspace (monitor Linux mount points) : YES freebsd (monitor FreeBSD systems) __ : NO macos (monitor MacOS systems) __ : NO statsd (collect custom application metrics) ____ : YES timex (check system clock synchronization) __ : YES idlejitter (check system latency and jitter) : YES bash (support shell data collection jobs - charts.d) _ : YES debugfs (kernel debugging metrics) ___ : YES cups (monitor printers and print jobs) _ : YES ebpf (monitor system calls) __ : NO freeipmi (monitor enterprise server H/W) _ : YES nfacct (gather netfilter accounting) ____ : NO perf (collect kernel performance events) : YES slabinfo (monitor kernel object caching) _ : YES Xen ____ : NO Xen VBD Error Tracking ___ : NO Exporters: AWS Kinesis ____ : NO GCP PubSub : NO MongoDB ____ : YES Prometheus (OpenMetrics) Exporter __ : YES Prometheus Remote Write ____ : YES Graphite __ : YES Graphite HTTP / HTTPS __ : YES JSON _ : YES JSON HTTP / HTTPS __ : YES OpenTSDB _ : YES OpenTSDB HTTP / HTTPS __ : YES All Metrics API ____ : YES Shell (use metrics in shell scripts) ____ : YES Debug/Developer Features: Trace All Netdata Allocations (with charts) ____ : NO Developer Mode (more runtime checks, slower) : NO