Disable update notification in web UI

[xginn8]

This notification is counterproductive as a sidecar

[xginn8]

There are also many sign-in buttons that would be good to kill

[saintaardvark]

I've had a look through the netdata code (both netdata/netdata and netdata/dashboard), and it doesn't look like there's an immediately obvious way to do this: there isn't a config option to turn off the update-now/sign-in options. There are 714 issues currently open on their main repo, so I don't think a request to turn this off is going to get a lot of attention real soon. 😁

Making a custom dashboard would seem to be a good way to accomplish what we want. If it needs to be a direct copy of the default dashboard, that will be a little tricky: the default index page is configured using React, in what seems to be a different way from the usual method they have for making custom dashboards. This is where the charts are defined; copying the particular data sources will be pretty easy, but getting the look of the dashboard right may mean examining the default dashboard and looking for the individual chart elements (<div data-netdata="system.cpu">).

[saintaardvark]

Further digging:

• An issue filed upstream about all this pointed me at this method for disabling Agent-Cloud, which I had managed to miss. This disables the Netdata Cloud login prompts, though it doesn't remove all their UI elements. Before disabling Agent-Cloud:

And after:

• I've disabled Agent-Cloud in the netdata-smol branch mentioned in Reduce image size if possible #7. The effect isn't has noticeable in the packaged version of Netdata, as the web UI is a bit different; the web UI now mentions "nodes", and it doesn't seem to go away if you disable Agent-Cloud:

• The dashboard repo has a node-view target (npm run start:node-view) which is just about exactly what we want: the top and left-hand side bars are gone, leaving just the default dashboard. However, it's hardcoded to point at localhost (1, 2, 3), and I'm not nearly expert at Typescript/React enough to know how to remove that. I've asked upstream if there's a way to do this.

[saintaardvark]

Upstream let us know that they have no plans to disable the "updates available" notice.