What are they and why do we need them?
A “Parent” is a Netdata Agent, like the ones we install on all our systems, but is configured as a central node that receives, stores and processes metrics data from other Netdata “Child” nodes in our infrastructure.
Netdata Parents are flexible. You can have one big active-active cluster of Netdata Parents, or you can spread a lot of independent Parents across the infrastructure.
This “distributed still centralized” setup provides a lot of benefits. Let’s go through them one by one in this blog post.