Netdata vs Sidebar Diagnostics

Netdata is an observability platform for real-time infrastructure monitoring and troubleshooting. Its agent gathers metrics and logs and provides per-second monitoring, machine-learning anomaly detection, dashboards, and alerts. Netdata lists more than 800 collectors and notification channels, including Slack, PagerDuty, Microsoft Teams, email, and webhooks. The agent can ingest Prometheus, OpenMetrics, StatsD, and OpenTelemetry data and export to Prometheus Remote Write, InfluxDB, Graphite, OpenTSDB, and TimescaleDB. Organizations can use the managed cloud platform or deploy on premises, including in air-gapped environments. Netdata says metrics remain on the user's infrastructure while only metadata reaches the cloud. Native Android and iOS apps provide alerts and notifications. The Community plan is free, with up to five active connected nodes and one active custom dashboard per room. Signing up for Netdata Cloud includes a 14-day Business trial for any number of nodes with no limits. Business costs $4.50 per month billed annually, with a stated total of $540.00/year.

Sidebar Diagnostics is a free Windows desktop sidebar for viewing hardware diagnostic information. It monitors CPU, RAM, GPU, network, and logical drives, and can graph those measurements. The sidebar can show a clock and supports alerts, hotkeys, and monitors with different DPI settings. The project describes extensive customization, with hardware data supplied by Libre Hardware Monitor. The README lists Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, and Windows 10 as supported systems. Releases include an installer and a standalone ZIP; the standalone build does not update automatically. The application must be run as administrator. The GitHub repository identifies it as GPL-3.0 software and provides an issue template for reporting problems. The author says it will always be free on GitHub and invites donations. The Free plan costs nothing. Remote monitoring is not supported.