Deploy Netdata with Ansible

Meet Ansible, a popular tool for provisioning, configuration management, and infrastructure as code (IaC).

This guide walks you through deploying the Netdata Agent across multiple nodes using an Ansible playbook, managing configurations, and connecting to Netdata Cloud—all in minutes.

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With Ansible, you can deploy Netdata repeatedly without disrupting your infrastructure—ensuring monitoring as code.

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Prerequisites

• Netdata Cloud account. Sign in and create one if you don't have one already.
• An administration system with Ansible installed.
• One or more nodes that your administration system can access via SSH public keys (preferably password-less).

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Deployment Architecture

Below is a visual representation of the deployment architecture, illustrating the relationship between the host system, Docker, the Netdata container, and key mounts/privileges.

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Download and Configure the Playbook

First, download the playbook, move it to the current directory, and remove the rest of the cloned repository, as it's not required for using the Ansible playbook.

git clone https://github.com/netdata/community.git
mv community/configuration-management/ansible-quickstart .
rm -rf community

Or if you don't want to clone the entire repository, use the gitzip browser extension to get the netdata-agent-deployment directory as a zip file.

Next, navigate into the Ansible directory.

cd ansible-quickstart

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Edit the hosts File

The hosts file contains a list of IP addresses or hostnames that Ansible will target. Replace the example IP addresses with those of your nodes.

203.0.113.0  hostname=node-01
203.0.113.1  hostname=node-02

You can also set the hostname variable, which appears both on the local Agent dashboard and Netdata Cloud, or omit the hostname= string entirely to use the system's default hostname.

Set the Login User (Optional)

If you SSH into your nodes as a user other than root, configure hosts accordingly using the ansible_user variable. For example:

203.0.113.0  hostname=ansible-01  ansible_user=example

Set Your SSH Key (Optional)

If you use an SSH key other than ~/.ssh/id_rsa for logging into your nodes, specify it per node in the hosts file with the ansible_ssh_private_key_file variable. For example:

203.0.113.0  hostname=ansible-01  ansible_ssh_private_key_file=~/.ssh/LightsailDefaultKey-us-west-2.pem
203.0.113.1  hostname=ansible-02  ansible_ssh_private_key_file=~/.ssh/LightsailDefaultKey-us-east-1.pem

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Edit the vars/main.yml File

To connect your node(s) to your Space in Netdata Cloud and see all their metrics in real-time, set the claim_token and claim_rooms variables.

To find your claim_token and claim_rooms, go to Netdata Cloud, click on your Space's name in the top navigation, then click on Manage your Space. Click on the Nodes tab in the panel that appears, which displays a script with token and room strings.

Copy those strings into the claim_token and claim_rooms variables.

claim_token: YOUR_CLAIM_TOKEN
claim_rooms: YOUR_CLAIM_ROOMS

Adjust the dbengine_multihost_disk_space variable to change the metrics retention policy by allocating more or less disk space for storing metrics. The default is 2048 MiB (2 GiB).

Since this node connects to Netdata Cloud, we'll view its dashboards there instead of using its IP or hostname. The playbook disables the local dashboard by setting web_mode to none, adding a small security boost by preventing unwanted access.

You can read more about this decision, or other ways to lock down the local dashboard, in our node security documentation.

Curious about why Netdata's dashboard is open by default? Read our blog post on that zero-configuration design decision.

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Run the Playbook

Execute the playbook from your administration system:

ansible-playbook -i hosts tasks/main.yml

Ansible connects to your node(s) via SSH, collects facts about the system, and then applies the defined tasks.

The task to install Netdata may take a few minutes per node. Once the playbook reaches the "connect to Cloud" task, your nodes will start appearing in your Space in Netdata Cloud.