Comparing CollectD,Telegraf and NetData

Comparing CollectD,Telegraf and NetData

In this article we will compare three popular metrics collector agents which are Netdata, CollectD and Telegraf. This is not meant to be an analysis to find out which is better or worse. We will just explain how we used these tools in our environment and what are the advantages of each.

Collectd

Advantages

1. It is written in C and very very lightweight.
2. Great community support , more than 100 plugins available.
3. Project is matured over last 12 years and stable.
4. Support all major time-series database backends like Graphite, InfluxDB , OpenTSDB and prometheus.
5. Writing plugins is easy,

Cons

1. It support Tags , but not in a good way.

Telegraf

1. Memory footprint lesser than CollectD.
2. Great community support , within one year available plugins increased from 18 to 80+
3. Supports all major time series databases, elasticsearch, Graphite, major cloud providers
4. Great Tag support
5. Project is supported by InfluxData

Cons

1. Writing plugins : Eventhough plugin architecture is simple, you have to be familiar with GO.

Netdata

1. Lightweight , memory footprint is very small.
2. It has a beautiful interactive and fast UI with builtin webserver where you can see the data in realtime
3. It collects large number of metrics by default. That means zero configuration
4. Sophisticated alarming
5. Supports following time-series backends : Graphite, Opentsdb and Prometheus

Cons

1.Still in evolving phase, time-series backends support was added recently.