1 collectd - System information collection daemon
2 =================================================
8 collectd is a small daemon which collects system information periodically
9 and provides mechanisms to store and monitor the values in a variety of
16 * collectd is able to collect the following data:
19 Apache server utilization: Number of bytes transfered, number of
20 requests handled and detailed scoreboard statistics
23 APC UPS Daemon: UPS charge, load, input/output/battery voltage, etc.
26 Sensors in Macs running Mac OS X / Darwin: Temperature, fanspeed and
30 Statistics about Ascent, a free server for the game `World of Warcraft'.
33 Batterycharge, -current and voltage of ACPI and PMU based laptop
37 Name server and resolver statistics from the `statistics-channel'
38 interface of BIND 9.5, 9,6 and later.
41 CPU accounting information for process groups under Linux.
44 Number of nf_conntrack entries.
47 Number of context switches done by the operating system.
50 CPU utilization: Time spent in the system, user, nice, idle, and related
54 CPU frequency (For laptops with speed step or a similar technology)
57 Parse statistics from websites using regular expressions.
60 Retrieves JSON data via cURL and parses it according to user
64 Retrieves XML data via cURL and parses it according to user
68 Executes SQL statements on various databases and interprets the returned
72 Mountpoint usage (Basically the values `df(1)' delivers)
75 Disk utilization: Sectors read/written, number of read/write actions,
76 average time an IO-operation took to complete.
79 DNS traffic: Query types, response codes, opcodes and traffic/octets
83 Email statistics: Count, traffic, spam scores and checks.
84 See collectd-email(5).
87 Amount of entropy available to the system.
90 Network interface card statistics.
93 Values gathered by a custom program or script.
97 Count the number of files in directories.
100 Linux file-system based caching framework statistics.
103 Receive multicast traffic from Ganglia instances.
106 Harddisk temperatures using hddtempd.
109 Interface traffic: Number of octets, packets and errors for each
113 Iptables' counters: Number of bytes that were matched by a certain
117 IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) sensors information.
120 IPVS connection statistics (number of connections, octets and packets
121 for each service and destination).
122 See http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/software/index.html.
125 IRQ counters: Frequency in which certain interrupts occur.
128 Integrates a `Java Virtual Machine' (JVM) to execute plugins in Java
129 bytecode. See “Configuring with libjvm” below.
132 System load average over the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes.
135 Detailed CPU statistics of the “Logical Partitions” virtualization
136 technique built into IBM's POWER processors.
139 CPU, memory, disk and network I/O statistics from virtual machines.
142 Size of “Logical Volumes” (LV) and “Volume Groups” (VG) of Linux'
143 “Logical Volume Manager” (LVM).
146 Queries very detailed usage statistics from wireless LAN adapters and
147 interfaces that use the Atheros chipset and the MadWifi driver.
150 Motherboard sensors: temperature, fanspeed and voltage information,
154 Linux software-RAID device information (number of active, failed, spare
158 Query and parse data from a memcache daemon (memcached).
161 Statistics of the memcached distributed caching system.
162 <http://www.danga.com/memcached/>
165 Memory utilization: Memory occupied by running processes, page cache,
166 buffer cache and free.
169 Collects CPU usage, memory usage, temperatures and power consumption from
170 Intel Many Integrated Core (MIC) CPUs.
173 Reads values from Modbus/TCP enabled devices. Supports reading values
174 from multiple "slaves" so gateway devices can be used.
177 Information provided by serial multimeters, such as the `Metex
181 MySQL server statistics: Commands issued, handlers triggered, thread
182 usage, query cache utilization and traffic/octets sent and received.
185 Plugin to query performance values from a NetApp storage system using the
186 “Manage ONTAP” SDK provided by NetApp.
189 Very detailed Linux network interface and routing statistics. You can get
190 (detailed) information on interfaces, qdiscs, classes, and, if you can
191 make use of it, filters.
194 Receive values that were collected by other hosts. Large setups will
195 want to collect the data on one dedicated machine, and this is the
196 plugin of choice for that.
199 NFS Procedures: Which NFS command were called how often. Only NFSv2 and
203 Collects statistics from `nginx' (speak: engine X), a HTTP and mail
207 NTP daemon statistics: Local clock drift, offset to peers, etc.
210 Network UPS tools: UPS current, voltage, power, charge, utilisation,
211 temperature, etc. See upsd(8).
214 Information about Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA).
217 Queries routing information from the “Optimized Link State Routing”
220 - onewire (EXPERIMENTAL!)
221 Read onewire sensors using the owcapu library of the owfs project.
222 Please read in collectd.conf(5) why this plugin is experimental.
225 RX and TX of each client in openvpn-status.log (status-version 2).
226 <http://openvpn.net/index.php/documentation/howto.html>
229 Query data from an Oracle database.
232 The perl plugin implements a Perl-interpreter into collectd. You can
233 write your own plugins in Perl and return arbitrary values using this
234 API. See collectd-perl(5).
237 Query statistics from BSD's packet filter "pf".
240 Receive and dispatch timing values from Pinba, a profiling extension for
244 Network latency: Time to reach the default gateway or another given
248 PostgreSQL database statistics: active server connections, transaction
249 numbers, block IO, table row manipulations.
252 PowerDNS name server statistics.
255 Process counts: Number of running, sleeping, zombie, ... processes.
258 Counts various aspects of network protocols such as IP, TCP, UDP, etc.
261 The python plugin implements a Python interpreter into collectd. This
262 makes it possible to write plugins in Python which are executed by
263 collectd without the need to start a heavy interpreter every interval.
264 See collectd-python(5) for details.
267 The redis plugin gathers information from a redis server, including:
268 uptime, used memory, total connections etc.
271 Query interface and wireless registration statistics from RouterOS.
274 RRDtool caching daemon (RRDcacheD) statistics.
277 System sensors, accessed using lm_sensors: Voltages, temperatures and
281 RX and TX of serial interfaces. Linux only; needs root privileges.
284 Read values from SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) enabled
285 network devices such as switches, routers, thermometers, rack monitoring
286 servers, etc. See collectd-snmp(5).
289 Pages swapped out onto harddisk or whatever is called `swap' by the OS..
292 Parse table-like structured files.
295 Follows (tails) logfiles, parses them by lines and submits matched
299 Follows (tails) files in CSV format, parses each line and submits
303 Bytes and operations read and written on tape devices. Solaris only.
306 Number of TCP connections to specific local and remote ports.
309 TeamSpeak2 server statistics.
312 Plugin to read values from `The Energy Detective' (TED).
315 Linux ACPI thermal zone information.
318 Reads the number of records and file size from a running Tokyo Tyrant
322 System uptime statistics.
325 Users currently logged in.
328 Various statistics from Varnish, an HTTP accelerator.
331 Virtual memory statistics, e. g. the number of page-ins/-outs or the
332 number of pagefaults.
335 System resources used by Linux VServers.
336 See <http://linux-vserver.org/>.
339 Link quality of wireless cards. Linux only.
342 Bitrate and frequency of music played with XMMS.
345 Statistics for ZFS' “Adaptive Replacement Cache” (ARC).
347 * Output can be written or sent to various destinations by the following
351 Sends JSON-encoded data to an Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP)
352 server, such as RabbitMQ.
355 Write to comma separated values (CSV) files. This needs lots of
356 diskspace but is extremely portable and can be analysed with almost
357 every program that can analyse anything. Even Microsoft's Excel..
360 Send the data to a remote host to save the data somehow. This is useful
361 for large setups where the data should be saved by a dedicated machine.
364 Of course the values are propagated to plugins written in Perl, too, so
365 you can easily do weird stuff with the plugins we didn't dare think of
366 ;) See collectd-perl(5).
369 It's possible to implement write plugins in Python using the python
370 plugin. See collectd-python(5) for details.
373 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using the RRDtool caching
374 daemon (RRDcacheD) - see rrdcached(1). That daemon provides a general
375 implementation of the caching done by the `rrdtool' plugin.
378 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using librrd. See rrdtool(1).
379 This is likely the most popular destination for such values. Since
380 updates to RRD-files are somewhat expensive this plugin can cache
381 updates to the files and write a bunch of updates at once, which lessens
385 One can query the values from the unixsock plugin whenever they're
386 needed. Please read collectd-unixsock(5) for a description on how that's
390 Sends data to Carbon, the storage layer of Graphite.
393 Sends the values collected by collectd to a web-server using HTTP POST
394 requests. The transmitted data is either in a form understood by the
395 Exec plugin or formatted in JSON.
398 Sends data to MongoDB, a NoSQL database.
401 Sends the values to a Redis key-value database server.
404 Sends data to Riemann, a stream processing and monitoring system.
406 * Logging is, as everything in collectd, provided by plugins. The following
407 plugins keep up informed about what's going on:
410 Writes logmessages to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
413 Log messages are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
414 See collectd-perl(5).
417 It's possible to implement log plugins in Python using the python plugin.
418 See collectd-python(5) for details.
421 Logs to the standard UNIX logging mechanism, syslog.
423 * Notifications can be handled by the following plugins:
426 Send a desktop notification to a notification daemon, as defined in
427 the Desktop Notification Specification. To actually display the
428 notifications, notification-daemon is required.
429 See http://www.galago-project.org/specs/notification/.
432 Send an E-mail with the notification message to the configured
436 Execute a program or script to handle the notification.
437 See collectd-exec(5).
440 Writes the notification message to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
443 Send the notification to a remote host to handle it somehow.
446 Notifications are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
447 See collectd-perl(5).
450 It's possible to implement notification plugins in Python using the
451 python plugin. See collectd-python(5) for details.
453 * Value processing can be controlled using the "filter chain" infrastructure
454 and "matches" and "targets". The following plugins are available:
456 - match_empty_counter
457 Match counter values which are currently zero.
460 Match values using a hash function of the hostname.
463 Match values by their identifier based on regular expressions.
466 Match values with an invalid timestamp.
469 Select values by their data sources' values.
471 - target_notification
472 Create and dispatch a notification.
475 Replace parts of an identifier using regular expressions.
478 Scale (multiply) values by an arbitrary value.
481 Set (overwrite) entire parts of an identifier.
483 * Miscellaneous plugins:
486 Selects multiple value lists based on patterns or regular expressions
487 and creates new aggregated values lists from those.
490 Checks values against configured thresholds and creates notifications if
491 values are out of bounds. See collectd-threshold(5) for details.
494 Sets the hostname to an unique identifier. This is meant for setups
495 where each client may migrate to another physical host, possibly going
496 through one or more name changes in the process.
498 * Performance: Since collectd is running as a daemon it doesn't spend much
499 time starting up again and again. With the exception of the exec plugin no
500 processes are forked. Caching in output plugins, such as the rrdtool and
501 network plugins, makes sure your resources are used efficiently. Also,
502 since collectd is programmed multithreaded it benefits from hyperthreading
503 and multicore processors and makes sure that the daemon isn't idle if only
504 one plugin waits for an IO-operation to complete.
506 * Once set up, hardly any maintenance is necessary. Setup is kept as easy
507 as possible and the default values should be okay for most users.
513 * collectd's configuration file can be found at `sysconfdir'/collectd.conf.
514 Run `collectd -h' for a list of builtin defaults. See `collectd.conf(5)'
515 for a list of options and a syntax description.
517 * When the `csv' or `rrdtool' plugins are loaded they'll write the values to
518 files. The usual place for these files is beneath `/var/lib/collectd'.
520 * When using some of the plugins, collectd needs to run as user root, since
521 only root can do certain things, such as craft ICMP packages needed to ping
522 other hosts. collectd should NOT be installed setuid root since it can be
523 used to overwrite valuable files!
525 * Sample scripts to generate graphs reside in `contrib/' in the source
526 package or somewhere near `/usr/share/doc/collectd' in most distributions.
527 Please be aware that those script are meant as a starting point for your
528 own experiments.. Some of them require the `RRDs' Perl module.
529 (`librrds-perl' on Debian) If you have written a more sophisticated
530 solution please share it with us.
532 * The RRAs of the automatically created RRD files depend on the `step'
533 and `heartbeat' settings given. If change these settings you may need to
534 re-create the files, losing all data. Please be aware of that when changing
535 the values and read the rrdtool(1) manpage thoroughly.
538 collectd and chkrootkit
539 -----------------------
541 If you are using the `dns' plugin chkrootkit(1) will report collectd as a
542 packet sniffer ("<iface>: PACKET SNIFFER(/usr/sbin/collectd[<pid>])"). The
543 plugin captures all UDP packets on port 53 to analyze the DNS traffic. In
544 this case, collectd is a legitimate sniffer and the report should be
545 considered to be a false positive. However, you might want to check that
546 this really is collectd and not some other, illegitimate sniffer.
552 To compile collectd from source you will need:
554 * Usual suspects: C compiler, linker, preprocessor, make, ...
556 * A POSIX-threads (pthread) implementation.
557 Since gathering some statistics is slow (network connections, slow devices,
558 etc) the collectd is parallelized. The POSIX threads interface is being
559 used and should be found in various implementations for hopefully all
562 * CoreFoundation.framework and IOKit.framework (optional)
563 For compiling on Darwin in general and the `apple_sensors' plugin in
565 <http://developer.apple.com/corefoundation/>
567 * libclntsh (optional)
568 Used by the `oracle' plugin.
570 * libcredis (optional)
571 Used by the redis plugin. Please note that you require a 0.2.2 version
572 or higher. <http://code.google.com/p/credis/>
575 If you want to use the `apache', `ascent', `curl', `nginx', or `write_http'
577 <http://curl.haxx.se/>
580 Used by the `dbi' plugin to connect to various databases.
581 <http://libdbi.sourceforge.net/>
583 * libesmtp (optional)
584 For the `notify_email' plugin.
585 <http://www.stafford.uklinux.net/libesmtp/>
587 * libganglia (optional)
588 Used by the `gmond' plugin to process data received from Ganglia.
589 <http://ganglia.info/>
591 * libgcrypt (optional)
592 Used by the `network' plugin for encryption and authentication.
593 <http://www.gnupg.org/>
596 If present, the uuid plugin will check for UUID from HAL.
597 <http://hal.freedesktop.org/>
600 For querying iptables counters.
601 <http://netfilter.org/>
603 If not found on the system, a version shipped with this distribution can
604 be used. It requires some Linux headers in /usr/include/linux. You can
605 force the build system to use the shipped version by specifying
606 --with-libiptc=shipped
607 when running the configure script.
610 Library that encapsulates the `Java Virtual Machine' (JVM). This library is
611 used by the Java plugin to execute Java bytecode. See “Configuring with
613 <http://openjdk.java.net/> (and others)
615 * libmemcached (optional)
616 Used by the `memcachec' plugin to connect to a memcache daemon.
617 <http://tangent.org/552/libmemcached.html>
619 * libmodbus (optional)
620 Used by the “modbus” plugin to communicate with Modbus/TCP devices. The
621 “modbus” plugin works with version 2.0.3 of the library – due to frequent
622 API changes other versions may or may not compile cleanly.
623 <http://www.libmodbus.org/>
625 * libmysqlclient (optional)
626 Unsurprisingly used by the `mysql' plugin.
627 <http://dev.mysql.com/>
629 * libnetapp (optional)
630 Required for the “netapp” plugin.
631 This library is part of the “Manage ONTAP SDK” published by NetApp.
633 * libnetlink (optional)
634 Used, obviously, for the `netlink' plugin.
635 <http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Net:Iproute2>
637 * libnetsnmp (optional)
638 For the `snmp' plugin.
639 <http://www.net-snmp.org/>
641 * libnotify (optional)
642 For the `notify_desktop' plugin.
643 <http://www.galago-project.org/>
645 * liboping (optional)
646 Used by the `ping' plugin to send and receive ICMP packets.
647 <http://verplant.org/liboping/>
649 * libowcapi (optional)
650 Used by the `onewire' plugin to read values from onewire sensors (or the
652 <http://www.owfs.org/>
655 Used to capture packets by the `dns' plugin.
656 <http://www.tcpdump.org/>
658 * libperfstat (optional)
659 Used by various plugins to gather statistics under AIX.
662 Obviously used by the `perl' plugin. The library has to be compiled with
663 ithread support (introduced in Perl 5.6.0).
664 <http://www.perl.org/>
667 The PostgreSQL C client library used by the `postgresql' plugin.
668 <http://www.postgresql.org/>
670 * libprotobuf-c, protoc-c (optional)
671 Used by the `pinba' plugin to generate a parser for the network packets
672 sent by the Pinba PHP extension.
673 <http://code.google.com/p/protobuf-c/>
675 * libpython (optional)
676 Used by the `python' plugin. Currently, Python 2.3 and later and Python 3
678 <http://www.python.org/>
680 * librabbitmq (optional; also called “rabbitmq-c”)
681 Used by the AMQP plugin for AMQP connections, for example to RabbitMQ.
682 <http://hg.rabbitmq.com/rabbitmq-c/>
684 * librouteros (optional)
685 Used by the `routeros' plugin to connect to a device running `RouterOS'.
686 <http://verplant.org/librouteros/>
689 Used by the `rrdtool' and `rrdcached' plugins. The latter requires RRDtool
690 client support which was added after version 1.3 of RRDtool. Versions 1.0,
691 1.2 and 1.3 are known to work with the `rrdtool' plugin.
692 <http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/>
694 * librt, libsocket, libkstat, libdevinfo (optional)
695 Various standard Solaris libraries which provide system functions.
696 <http://developers.sun.com/solaris/>
698 * libsensors (optional)
699 To read from `lm_sensors', see the `sensors' plugin.
700 <http://www.lm-sensors.org/>
702 * libstatgrab (optional)
703 Used by various plugins to collect statistics on systems other than Linux
705 <http://www.i-scream.org/libstatgrab/>
707 * libtokyotyrant (optional)
708 Used by the tokyotyrant plugin.
709 <http://1978th.net/tokyotyrant/>
711 * libupsclient/nut (optional)
712 For the `nut' plugin which queries nut's `upsd'.
713 <http://networkupstools.org/>
716 Collect statistics from virtual machines.
717 <http://libvirt.org/>
720 Parse XML data. This is needed for the `ascent' and `libvirt' plugins.
721 <http://xmlsoft.org/>
724 <http://www.xmms.org/>
727 Parse JSON data. This is needed for the `curl_json' plugin.
728 <http://github.com/lloyd/yajl>
730 * libvarnish (optional)
731 Fetches statistics from a Varnish instance. This is needed for the Varnish plugin
732 <http://varnish-cache.org>
734 Configuring / Compiling / Installing
735 ------------------------------------
737 To configure, build and install collectd with the default settings, run
738 `./configure && make && make install'. For detailed, generic instructions
739 see INSTALL. For a complete list of configure options and their description,
740 run `./configure --help'.
742 By default, the configure script will check for all build dependencies and
743 disable all plugins whose requirements cannot be fulfilled (any other plugin
744 will be enabled). To enable a plugin, install missing dependencies (see
745 section `Prerequisites' above) and rerun `configure'. If you specify the
746 `--enable-<plugin>' configure option, the script will fail if the depen-
747 dencies for the specified plugin are not met. In that case you can force the
748 plugin to be built using the `--enable-<plugin>=force' configure option.
749 This will most likely fail though unless you're working in a very unusual
750 setup and you really know what you're doing. If you specify the
751 `--disable-<plugin>' configure option, the plugin will not be built. If you
752 specify the `--enable-all-plugins' or `--disable-all-plugins' configure
753 options, all plugins will be enabled or disabled respectively by default.
754 Explicitly enabling or disabling a plugin overwrites the default for the
755 specified plugin. These options are meant for package maintainers and should
756 not be used in everyday situations.
758 By default, collectd will be installed into `/opt/collectd'. You can adjust
759 this setting by specifying the `--prefix' configure option - see INSTALL for
760 details. If you pass DESTDIR=<path> to `make install', <path> will be
761 prefixed to all installation directories. This might be useful when creating
762 packages for collectd.
764 Configuring with libjvm
765 -----------------------
767 To determine the location of the required files of a Java installation is not
768 an easy task, because the locations vary with your kernel (Linux, SunOS, …)
769 and with your architecture (x86, SPARC, …) and there is no ‘java-config’
770 script we could use. Configuration of the JVM library is therefore a bit
773 The easiest way to use the `--with-java=$JAVA_HOME' option, where
774 `$JAVA_HOME' is usually something like:
775 /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0.14
777 The configure script will then use find(1) to look for the following files:
783 If found, appropriate CPP-flags and LD-flags are set and the following
784 library checks succeed.
786 If this doesn't work for you, you have the possibility to specify CPP-flags,
787 C-flags and LD-flags for the ‘Java’ plugin by hand, using the following three
788 (environment) variables:
794 For example (shortened for demonstration purposes):
796 ./configure JAVA_CPPFLAGS="-I$JAVA_HOME/include -I$JAVA_HOME/include/linux"
798 Adding "-ljvm" to the JAVA_LDFLAGS is done automatically, you don't have to
804 To compile correctly collectd needs to be able to initialize static
805 variables to NAN (Not A Number). Some C libraries, especially the GNU
806 libc, have a problem with that.
808 Luckily, with GCC it's possible to work around that problem: One can define
809 NAN as being (0.0 / 0.0) and `isnan' as `f != f'. However, to test this
810 ``implementation'' the configure script needs to compile and run a short
811 test program. Obviously running a test program when doing a cross-
812 compilation is, well, challenging.
814 If you run into this problem, you can use the `--with-nan-emulation'
815 configure option to force the use of this implementation. We can't promise
816 that the compiled binary actually behaves as it should, but since NANs
817 are likely never passed to the libm you have a good chance to be lucky.
819 Likewise, collectd needs to know the layout of doubles in memory, in order
820 to craft uniform network packets over different architectures. For this, it
821 needs to know how to convert doubles into the memory layout used by x86. The
822 configure script tries to figure this out by compiling and running a few
823 small test programs. This is of course not possible when cross-compiling.
824 You can use the `--with-fp-layout' option to tell the configure script which
825 conversion method to assume. Valid arguments are:
827 * `nothing' (12345678 -> 12345678)
828 * `endianflip' (12345678 -> 87654321)
829 * `intswap' (12345678 -> 56781234)
835 For questions, bug reports, development information and basically all other
836 concerns please send an email to collectd's mailing list at
837 <collectd at verplant.org>.
839 For live discussion and more personal contact visit us in IRC, we're in
840 channel #collectd on freenode.
846 Florian octo Forster <octo at verplant.org>,
847 Sebastian tokkee Harl <sh at tokkee.org>,
848 and many contributors (see `AUTHORS').
850 Please send bug reports and patches to the mailing list, see `Contact'