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+<!--
+title: "Step 1. Netdata's building blocks"
+custom_edit_url: https://github.com/netdata/netdata/edit/master/docs/guides/step-by-step/step-01.md
+-->
+
+# Step 1. Netdata's building blocks
+
+Netdata is a distributed and real-time _health monitoring and performance troubleshooting toolkit_ for monitoring your
+systems and applications.
+
+Because the monitoring agent is highly-optimized, you can install it all your physical systems, containers, IoT devices,
+and edge devices without disrupting their core function.
+
+By default, and without configuration, Netdata delivers real-time insights into everything happening on the system, from
+CPU utilization to packet loss on every network device. Netdata can also auto-detect metrics from hundreds of your
+favorite services and applications, like MySQL/MariaDB, Docker, Nginx, Apache, MongoDB, and more.
+
+All metrics are automatically-updated, providing interactive dashboards that allow you to dive in, discover anomalies,
+and figure out the root cause analysis of any issue.
+
+Best of all, Netdata is entirely free, open-source software! Solo developers and enterprises with thousands of systems
+can both use it free of charge. We're hosted on [GitHub](https://github.com/netdata/netdata).
+
+Want to learn about the history of Netdata, and what inspired our CEO to build it in the first place, and where we're
+headed? Read Costa's comprehensive blog post: _[Redefining monitoring with Netdata (and how it came to
+be)](https://blog.netdata.cloud/posts/redefining-monitoring-netdata/)_.
+
+## What you'll learn in this step
+
+In the first step of the Netdata guide, you'll learn about:
+
+-   [Netdata's core features](#netdatas-core-features)
+-   [Why you should use Netdata](#why-you-should-use-netdata)
+-   [How Netdata has complementary systems, not competitors](#how-netdata-has-complementary-systems-not-competitors)
+
+Let's get started!
+
+## Netdata's core features
+
+Netdata has only been around for a few years, but it's a complex piece of software. Here are just some of the features
+we'll cover throughout this guide.
+
+-   A sophisticated **dashboard**, which we'll cover in [step 2](step-02.md). The real-time, highly-granular dashboard,
+    with hundreds of charts, is your main source of information about the health and performance of your systems/
+    applications. We designed the dashboard with anomaly detection and quick analysis in mind. We'll return to
+    dashboard-related topics in both [step 7](step-07.md) and [step 8](step-08.md).
+-   **Long-term metrics storage** by default. With our new database engine, you can store days, weeks, or months of
+    per-second historical metrics. Or you can archive metrics to another database, like MongoDB or Prometheus. We'll
+    cover all these options in [step 9](step-09.md).
+-   **No configuration necessary**. Without any configuration, you'll get thousands of real-time metrics and hundreds of
+    alarms designed by our community of sysadmin experts. But you _can_ configure Netdata in a lot of ways, some of
+    which we'll cover in [step 4](step-04.md).
+-   **Distributed, per-system installation**. Instead of centralizing metrics in one location, you install Netdata on
+    _every_ system, and each system is responsible for its metrics. Having distributed agents reduces cost and lets
+    Netdata run on devices with little available resources, such as IoT and edge devices, without affecting their core
+    purpose.
+-   **Sophisticated health monitoring** to ensure you always know when an anomaly hits. In [step 5](step-05.md), we dive
+    into how you can tune alarms, write your own alarm, and enable two types of notifications.
+-   **High-speed, low-resource collectors** that allow you to collect thousands of metrics every second while using only
+    a fraction of your system's CPU resources and a few MiB of RAM.
+-   **Netdata Cloud** is our SaaS toolkit that helps Netdata users monitor the health and performance of entire
+    infrastructures, whether they are two or two thousand (or more!) systems. We'll cover Netdata Cloud in [step
+    3](step-03.md).
+
+## Why you should use Netdata
+
+Because you care about the health and performance of your systems and applications, and all of the awesome features we
+just mentioned. And it's free!
+
+All these may be valid reasons, but let's step back and talk about Netdata's _principles_ for health monitoring and
+performance troubleshooting. We have a lot of [complementary
+systems](#how-netdata-has-complementary-systems-not-competitors), and we think there's a good reason why Netdata should
+always be your first choice when troubleshooting an anomaly.
+
+We built Netdata on four principles.
+
+### Per-second data collection
+
+Our first principle is per-second data collection for all metrics.
+
+That matters because you can't monitor a 2-second service-level agreement (SLA) with 10-second metrics. You can't detect
+quick anomalies if your metrics don't show them.
+
+How do we solve this? By decentralizing monitoring. Each node is responsible for collecting metrics, triggering alarms,
+and building dashboards locally, and we work hard to ensure it does each step (and others) with remarkable efficiency.
+For example, Netdata can [collect 100,000 metrics](https://github.com/netdata/netdata/issues/1323) every second while
+using only 9% of a single server-grade CPU core!
+
+By decentralizing monitoring and emphasizing speed at every turn, Netdata helps you scale your health monitoring and
+performance troubleshooting to an infrastructure of every size. _And_ you get to keep per-second metrics in long-term
+storage thanks to the database engine.
+
+### Unlimited metrics
+
+We believe all metrics are fundamentally important, and all metrics should be available to the user.
+
+If you don't collect _all_ the metrics a system creates, you're only seeing part of the story. It's like saying you've
+read a book after skipping all but the last ten pages. You only know the ending, not everything that leads to it.
+
+Most monitoring solutions exist to poke you when there's a problem, and then tell you to use a dozen different console
+tools to find the root cause. Netdata prefers to give you every piece of information you might need to understand why an
+anomaly happened.
+
+### Meaningful presentation
+
+We want every piece of Netdata's dashboard not only to look good and update every second, but also provide context as to
+what you're looking at and why it matters.
+
+The principle of meaningful presentation is fundamental to our dashboard's user experience (UX). We could have put
+charts in a grid or hidden some behind tabs or buttons. We instead chose to stack them vertically, on a single page, so
+you can visually see how, for example, a jump in disk usage can also increase system load.
+
+Here's an example of a system undergoing a disk stress test:
+
+![Screen Shot 2019-10-23 at 15 38
+32](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/1153921/67439589-7f920700-f5ab-11e9-930d-fb0014900d90.png)
+
+> For the curious, here's the command: `stress-ng --fallocate 4 --fallocate-bytes 4g --timeout 1m --metrics --verify
+> --times`!
+
+### Immediate results
+
+Finally, Netdata should be usable from the moment you install it.
+
+As we've talked about, and as you'll learn in the following nine steps, Netdata comes installed with:
+
+-   Auto-detected metrics
+-   Human-readable units
+-   Metrics that are structured into charts, families, and contexts
+-   Automatically generated dashboards
+-   Charts designed for visual anomaly detection
+-   Hundreds of pre-configured alarms
+
+By standardizing your monitoring infrastructure, Netdata tries to make at least one part of your administrative tasks
+easy!
+
+## How Netdata has complementary systems, not competitors
+
+We'll cover this quickly, as you're probably eager to get on with using Netdata itself.
+
+We don't want to lock you in to using Netdata by itself, and forever. By supporting [archiving to
+external databases](/exporting/README.md) like Graphite, Prometheus, OpenTSDB, MongoDB, and others, you can use Netdata _in
+conjunction_ with software that might seem like our competitors.
+
+We don't want to "wage war" with another monitoring solution, whether it's commercial, open-source, or anything in
+between. We just want to give you all the metrics every second, and what you do with them next is your business, not
+ours. Our mission is helping people create more extraordinary infrastructures!
+
+## What's next?
+
+We think it's imperative you understand why we built Netdata the way we did. But now that we have that behind us, let's
+get right into that dashboard you've heard so much about.
+
+[Next: Get to know Netdata's dashboard &rarr;](step-02.md)
+
+[![analytics](https://www.google-analytics.com/collect?v=1&aip=1&t=pageview&_s=1&ds=github&dr=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fnetdata%2Fnetdata&dl=https%3A%2F%2Fmy-netdata.io%2Fgithub%2Fdocs%2Fguides%2Fstep-by-step%2Fstep-01&_u=MAC~&cid=5792dfd7-8dc4-476b-af31-da2fdb9f93d2&tid=UA-64295674-3)](<>)