Monitoring a Complex, Heterogeneous Infrastructure
Transports Metropolitans de Barcelona (TMB), the public transportation provider in Barcelona, manages a vast and varied infrastructure hosted on AWS and on bare metal. Monitoring this infrastructure presents significant challenges due to its heterogeneous nature—spanning Linux, Windows, Kubernetes, cloud, and on-premises environments.
One of the main obstacles for TMB was finding a single tool capable of handling the breadth of this environment effectively. As the infrastructure evolved, it became essential to have a holistic view of all systems to avoid operational silos and improve response times to issues.
“We have a lot of infrastructure for a single team to monitor, with the added difficulty of being heterogeneous.”
Eduard Porquet Mateu, DevOps Engineer
TMB
The lack of a unified monitoring tool was a major pain point for TMB’s DevOps team. With servers, network devices, containers, and applications running across different platforms, a comprehensive solution was crucial to achieving their organizational objectives. After evaluating multiple tools, TMB chose Netdata, leveraging its flexibility and real-time observability to streamline monitoring across various systems.
A Holistic View with Netdata
With Netdata’s FOSS Agent and Cloud solutions, TMB achieved the all-encompassing monitoring it was searching for. Netdata’s extensive plugin support, including compatibility with Windows and Kubernetes, allowed TMB to monitor CPU, memory, disk, networking stacks, and more.
“Netdata gives us a holistic view of all our infrastructure. It has agent capacity or a plugin for everything, including Windows and Kubernetes.”
Eduard Porquet Mateu, DevOps Engineer
TMB
By integrating Netdata into their AWS infrastructure, TMB gained detailed, per-second metrics accuracy that allowed for faster and more effective troubleshooting. This improved visibility helped detect network issues—such as bandwidth problems and TCP retransmission errors—that otherwise would have gone unnoticed. The flexibility of Netdata, combined with its ease of setup and powerful alerting mechanisms, made it an essential tool for TMB’s operations.
Life with Netdata
Since implementing Netdata, TMB has seen several measurable improvements:
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Better Troubleshooting Potential: The depth and accuracy of metrics provided by Netdata enable the team to quickly correlate issues and investigate potential causes, significantly speeding up the resolution process. This is especially important for TMB’s complex network, where unexpected network collapses and server-specific issues need rapid attention.
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Time Savings: The team saved significant time by consolidating their monitoring efforts into Netdata, rather than relying on multiple tools like Prometheus, Kibana, or Grafana. “We achieved better and faster observability with Netdata singlehandedly than combining other tools,” said Eduard.
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Comprehensive Infrastructure Monitoring: Netdata serves as TMB’s primary tool for detailed metrics and observability, offering seamless integration with their existing stack, such as Prometheus, for a better correlation of data and a complete view of the infrastructure.
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ROI on Setup and Architecture: One of Netdata’s key advantages, according to TMB, is the value it provides relative to the effort invested. “You get a lot more than you invest, using the default configuration and alerting,” Eduard remarked. The agent-based architecture, combined with Netdata Cloud’s parent-child deployment model, has also been a key factor in improving scalability and monitoring efficiency.
“Netdata is the kind of software that gives more than you invest in it. A rare unicorn that obeys the ‘Pareto’ rule: for 20 percent of the effort, it solves 80 percent of the problem.”
Eduard Porquet Mateu, DevOps Engineer
TMB
Netdata’s real-time metrics and alerts have allowed TMB to stay ahead of potential issues, while its customizable architecture ensures the solution evolves with their infrastructure. Looking forward, TMB aims to fully migrate their monitoring to Netdata Cloud, taking advantage of its scalability, adding metadata, and improving team collaboration across departments.
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