netdata_netdata/packaging/installer/methods/macos.md

Install Netdata on macOS

Netdata works on macOS, albeit with some limitations. The number of charts displaying system metrics is limited, but you can use any of Netdata's external plugins to monitor any services you might have installed on your macOS system. You could also use a macOS system as the parent node in a streaming configuration.

We recommend you to install Netdata with the our automatic one-line installation script,

As an alternative you also have community-created and -maintained Homebrew package.

• Install Netdata via the Homebrew package
• Install Netdata from source

Being community-created and -maintained we don't guarantee that the features made available on our installation script will also be available or give support to it.

Install Netdata with our automatic one-line installation script

To install Netdata using our automatic kickstart script you will just need to run:

wget -O /tmp/netdata-kickstart.sh https://my-netdata.io/kickstart.sh && sh /tmp/netdata-kickstart.sh

With this script, you are also able to connect your nodes directly to Netdata Cloud if you wish, see more details on Connect an agent running in macOS

This currently only supports building Netdata locally, and requires dependencies to be handled either via Homebrew or MacPorts (we preferentially use Homebrew if both are found). By default, this will install Netdata under /usr/local/netdata.

Install Netdata with the Homebrew package

If you don't have Homebrew installed already, begin with their installation script:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install.sh)"

Next, you can use Homebrew's package, which installs Netdata all its dependencies in a single step:

brew install netdata

Homebrew will place your Netdata configuration directory at /usr/local/etc/netdata/. Use the edit-config script and the files in this directory to configure Netdata. For reference, you can find stock configuration files at /usr/local/Cellar/netdata/{NETDATA_VERSION}/lib/netdata/conf.d/.

Skip on ahead to the What's next? section to find links to helpful post-installation guides.

Install Netdata from source

We don't recommend installing Netdata from source on macOS, as it can be difficult to configure and install dependencies manually.

First open your terminal of choice and install the Xcode development packages.

xcode-select --install

Click Install on the Software Update popup window that appears. Then, use the same terminal session to use Homebrew to install some of Netdata's prerequisites. You can omit cmake in case you do not want to use Netdata Cloud.

brew install ossp-uuid autoconf automake pkg-config libuv lz4 json-c openssl@1.1 libtool cmake

If you want to use the database engine to store your metrics, you need to download and install the Judy library before proceeding compiling Netdata.

Next, download Netdata from our GitHub repository:

git clone https://github.com/netdata/netdata.git --recursive

Finally, cd into the newly-created directory and then start the installer script:

cd netdata/
sudo ./netdata-installer.sh --install /usr/local

Your Netdata configuration directory will be at /usr/local/netdata/, and your stock configuration directory will be at /usr/local/lib/netdata/conf.d/.

The installer will also install a startup plist to start Netdata when your macOS system boots.

What's next?

When you're finished with installation, check out our single-node or infrastructure monitoring quickstart guides based on your use case.

Or, skip straight to configuring the Netdata Agent.

Read through Netdata's documentation, which is structured based on actions and solutions, to enable features like health monitoring, alarm notifications, long-term metrics storage, exporting to external databases, and more.