Parents: Your Centralization Points

Parents are Netdata Agents that collect and store data from other Agents ("Children"). They act as centralization points for your observability data.

How It Works

1. You designate some Agents as Parents - Configure them to receive streaming data
2. Children stream their data to Parents - They push metrics continuously
3. Parents store and process everything - All metrics and logs from all Children
4. You access Parents for dashboards and alerts - Centralized monitoring interface
5. Cloud queries Parents when configured - Reduces load on production systems

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Parents give you centralized collection with distributed architecture benefits.

What Parents Do

Parents are specialized Netdata installations that you can configure to receive, store, and process observability data (metrics and logs) from multiple other systems in your infrastructure.

These Parents give you several core functions:

• Receiving and storing metrics and logs from multiple systems
• Processing and analyzing your collected data
• Running health checks and alerts
• Providing unified dashboards across all your systems
• Replicating data for your historical analysis

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This distributed yet centralized approach gives you the benefits of both decentralized collection and centralized analysis.

Why Use Parents

Use Case	Description	Benefits
Ephemeral Systems	Ideal for your Kubernetes nodes or temporary VMs that frequently go offline	You retain metrics and logs for analysis and troubleshooting even after node termination
Limited Resources	Offloads observability tasks from your systems with low disk space, CPU, RAM, or I/O bandwidth	Your production systems run efficiently without performance trade-offs
Multi-Node Dashboards Without Netdata Cloud	Aggregates data from all your nodes for centralized dashboards	You get Cloud-like functionality in environments that prefer or require on-premises solutions
Restricted Netdata Cloud Access	Acts as a bridge when your monitored systems can't connect to Netdata Cloud	You can still use Cloud features despite firewall restrictions or security policies

tip

If you want the full Netdata Cloud experience within your own infrastructure, consider Netdata Cloud Enterprise On-Prem — a self-hosted version that deploys the complete Cloud control plane in your environment. For the complete On-Prem documentation, see Netdata Cloud On-Prem.

How Multiple Parents Work

Click to see Parent architecture options

Scenario	Operation	Advantages
With Netdata Cloud	Queries all your Parents in parallel for a unified view	You get a seamless experience regardless of your underlying architecture
Without Netdata Cloud	Your Parents consolidate data from connected systems	You have a local view of metrics and logs without external dependencies
High Availability Setup	Your Parents share data with each other, forming a cluster	You won't lose data if one Parent fails

Technical Implementation

Parents consist of two major components you can deploy:

1. Metrics Centralization - Uses Netdata's streaming and replication features to centralize your metrics data

2. Logs Centralization - Uses systemd-journald methodologies to centralize your log data

You can configure your systems to connect to multiple Parents for redundancy. If a connection fails, they automatically switch to an available alternative.

In a high-availability setup, your Parents can form a cluster by sharing data with each other, ensuring all points have a complete copy of all your metrics and logs.

Click to see how high availability works

Connect your Parent to Netdata Cloud

A Parent is a regular Netdata Agent. Once it is connected to Netdata Cloud using the standard claiming process, its Children can be directly queried and are registered to Netdata Cloud automatically. See the Connect Agent to Cloud guide for instructions. :::

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Check out our Parent-Child Deployment Guide for step-by-step instructions.