Servers Sentinel vs Netdata
Netdata gives extraordinary per-second resolution on one host. We give one pane of glass, durable history and routed alerts across a fleet.
Last updated 2026-08-26
Netdata is the best thing available for looking at a single machine in real time. Per-second resolution, thousands of charts, zero configuration, and an interface that makes a live host genuinely legible. Where it stops fitting is when the question changes from *what is this host doing right now* to *which of my forty hosts needs attention this week*.
At a glance
| Servers Sentinel | Netdata | |
|---|---|---|
| Resolution | Seconds to a minute, tuned for cost | Per second, thousands of metrics |
| Focus | Fleet overview, incidents, alert routing | Deep real-time view of one host |
| History | Stored centrally, retained by plan | Short local retention; long-term needs Netdata Cloud or an exporter |
| Agent footprint | One snapshot per tick, long intervals for costly collectors | Higher by design - resolution is the product |
| Windows support | First-class Windows Service | Supported, less mature than Linux |
| Alerting | Threshold + duration, incident grouping, channel routing | Per-host health checks; central routing via Cloud |
| Security events | SSH/RDP brute force, sudo, new users, ports | Not the focus |
Where Netdata is the better answer
- You are debugging a performance problem on one machine and want to see it happen.
- You want the deepest possible out-of-the-box instrumentation of a Linux host with no configuration at all.
- You are happy with short local retention, or already run Prometheus for the long tail.
Where we are the better answer
- You have a fleet and need one page that tells you where to look, not forty dashboards.
- You need durable history for capacity planning - disk and memory exhaustion forecasts need weeks of samples.
- You want incident grouping so a rack outage is one alert rather than forty.
- Your fleet is mixed Windows and Linux and both have to behave the same way.
- You want uptime and TLS-certificate probes run centrally, not from each host.
They coexist well
These are complementary rather than exclusive, and running both is a perfectly reasonable setup: our alert tells you which host has a problem, and Netdata on that host tells you what it is doing per second while you look at it.