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 Various sensors in the Aquaero 5 watercooling board made by Aquacomputer.
33 Statistics about Ascent, a free server for the game `World of Warcraft'.
36 Using digital barometer sensor MPL115A2 or MPL3115 from Freescale provides
37 absolute barometric pressure, air pressure reduced to sea level and temperature.
40 Batterycharge, -current and voltage of ACPI and PMU based laptop
44 Name server and resolver statistics from the `statistics-channel'
45 interface of BIND 9.5, 9,6 and later.
48 CPU accounting information for process groups under Linux.
51 Number of nf_conntrack entries.
54 Number of context switches done by the operating system.
57 CPU utilization: Time spent in the system, user, nice, idle, and related
61 CPU frequency (For laptops with speed step or a similar technology)
64 Parse statistics from websites using regular expressions.
67 Retrieves JSON data via cURL and parses it according to user
71 Retrieves XML data via cURL and parses it according to user
75 Executes SQL statements on various databases and interprets the returned
79 Mountpoint usage (Basically the values `df(1)' delivers)
82 Disk utilization: Sectors read/written, number of read/write actions,
83 average time an IO-operation took to complete.
86 DNS traffic: Query types, response codes, opcodes and traffic/octets
90 Email statistics: Count, traffic, spam scores and checks.
91 See collectd-email(5).
94 Amount of entropy available to the system.
97 Network interface card statistics.
100 Values gathered by a custom program or script.
101 See collectd-exec(5).
104 Count the number of files in directories.
107 Linux file-system based caching framework statistics.
110 Receive multicast traffic from Ganglia instances.
113 Harddisk temperatures using hddtempd.
116 Interface traffic: Number of octets, packets and errors for each
120 Iptables' counters: Number of bytes that were matched by a certain
124 IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) sensors information.
127 IPVS connection statistics (number of connections, octets and packets
128 for each service and destination).
129 See http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/software/index.html.
132 IRQ counters: Frequency in which certain interrupts occur.
135 Integrates a `Java Virtual Machine' (JVM) to execute plugins in Java
136 bytecode. See “Configuring with libjvm” below.
139 System load average over the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes.
142 Detailed CPU statistics of the “Logical Partitions” virtualization
143 technique built into IBM's POWER processors.
146 CPU, memory, disk and network I/O statistics from virtual machines.
149 Size of “Logical Volumes” (LV) and “Volume Groups” (VG) of Linux'
150 “Logical Volume Manager” (LVM).
153 Queries very detailed usage statistics from wireless LAN adapters and
154 interfaces that use the Atheros chipset and the MadWifi driver.
157 Motherboard sensors: temperature, fanspeed and voltage information,
161 Linux software-RAID device information (number of active, failed, spare
165 Query and parse data from a memcache daemon (memcached).
168 Statistics of the memcached distributed caching system.
169 <http://www.danga.com/memcached/>
172 Memory utilization: Memory occupied by running processes, page cache,
173 buffer cache and free.
176 Collects CPU usage, memory usage, temperatures and power consumption from
177 Intel Many Integrated Core (MIC) CPUs.
180 Reads values from Modbus/TCP enabled devices. Supports reading values
181 from multiple "slaves" so gateway devices can be used.
184 Information provided by serial multimeters, such as the `Metex
188 MySQL server statistics: Commands issued, handlers triggered, thread
189 usage, query cache utilization and traffic/octets sent and received.
192 Plugin to query performance values from a NetApp storage system using the
193 “Manage ONTAP” SDK provided by NetApp.
196 Very detailed Linux network interface and routing statistics. You can get
197 (detailed) information on interfaces, qdiscs, classes, and, if you can
198 make use of it, filters.
201 Receive values that were collected by other hosts. Large setups will
202 want to collect the data on one dedicated machine, and this is the
203 plugin of choice for that.
206 NFS Procedures: Which NFS command were called how often. Only NFSv2 and
210 Collects statistics from `nginx' (speak: engine X), a HTTP and mail
214 NTP daemon statistics: Local clock drift, offset to peers, etc.
217 Network UPS tools: UPS current, voltage, power, charge, utilisation,
218 temperature, etc. See upsd(8).
221 Information about Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA).
224 Queries routing information from the “Optimized Link State Routing”
227 - onewire (EXPERIMENTAL!)
228 Read onewire sensors using the owcapu library of the owfs project.
229 Please read in collectd.conf(5) why this plugin is experimental.
232 RX and TX of each client in openvpn-status.log (status-version 2).
233 <http://openvpn.net/index.php/documentation/howto.html>
236 Query data from an Oracle database.
239 The perl plugin implements a Perl-interpreter into collectd. You can
240 write your own plugins in Perl and return arbitrary values using this
241 API. See collectd-perl(5).
244 Query statistics from BSD's packet filter "pf".
247 Receive and dispatch timing values from Pinba, a profiling extension for
251 Network latency: Time to reach the default gateway or another given
255 PostgreSQL database statistics: active server connections, transaction
256 numbers, block IO, table row manipulations.
259 PowerDNS name server statistics.
262 Process counts: Number of running, sleeping, zombie, ... processes.
265 Counts various aspects of network protocols such as IP, TCP, UDP, etc.
268 The python plugin implements a Python interpreter into collectd. This
269 makes it possible to write plugins in Python which are executed by
270 collectd without the need to start a heavy interpreter every interval.
271 See collectd-python(5) for details.
274 The redis plugin gathers information from a redis server, including:
275 uptime, used memory, total connections etc.
278 Query interface and wireless registration statistics from RouterOS.
281 RRDtool caching daemon (RRDcacheD) statistics.
284 System sensors, accessed using lm_sensors: Voltages, temperatures and
288 RX and TX of serial interfaces. Linux only; needs root privileges.
291 Uses libsigrok as a backend, allowing any sigrok-supported device
292 to have its measurements fed to collectd. This includes multimeters,
293 sound level meters, thermometers, and much more.
296 Read values from SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) enabled
297 network devices such as switches, routers, thermometers, rack monitoring
298 servers, etc. See collectd-snmp(5).
301 Pages swapped out onto harddisk or whatever is called `swap' by the OS..
304 Parse table-like structured files.
307 Follows (tails) logfiles, parses them by lines and submits matched
311 Follows (tails) files in CSV format, parses each line and submits
315 Bytes and operations read and written on tape devices. Solaris only.
318 Number of TCP connections to specific local and remote ports.
321 TeamSpeak2 server statistics.
324 Plugin to read values from `The Energy Detective' (TED).
327 Linux ACPI thermal zone information.
330 Reads the number of records and file size from a running Tokyo Tyrant
334 System uptime statistics.
337 Users currently logged in.
340 Various statistics from Varnish, an HTTP accelerator.
343 Virtual memory statistics, e. g. the number of page-ins/-outs or the
344 number of pagefaults.
347 System resources used by Linux VServers.
348 See <http://linux-vserver.org/>.
351 Link quality of wireless cards. Linux only.
354 Bitrate and frequency of music played with XMMS.
357 Statistics for ZFS' “Adaptive Replacement Cache” (ARC).
359 * Output can be written or sent to various destinations by the following
363 Sends JSON-encoded data to an Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP)
364 server, such as RabbitMQ.
367 Write to comma separated values (CSV) files. This needs lots of
368 diskspace but is extremely portable and can be analysed with almost
369 every program that can analyse anything. Even Microsoft's Excel..
372 Send the data to a remote host to save the data somehow. This is useful
373 for large setups where the data should be saved by a dedicated machine.
376 Of course the values are propagated to plugins written in Perl, too, so
377 you can easily do weird stuff with the plugins we didn't dare think of
378 ;) See collectd-perl(5).
381 It's possible to implement write plugins in Python using the python
382 plugin. See collectd-python(5) for details.
385 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using the RRDtool caching
386 daemon (RRDcacheD) - see rrdcached(1). That daemon provides a general
387 implementation of the caching done by the `rrdtool' plugin.
390 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using librrd. See rrdtool(1).
391 This is likely the most popular destination for such values. Since
392 updates to RRD-files are somewhat expensive this plugin can cache
393 updates to the files and write a bunch of updates at once, which lessens
397 One can query the values from the unixsock plugin whenever they're
398 needed. Please read collectd-unixsock(5) for a description on how that's
402 Sends data to Carbon, the storage layer of Graphite using TCP or UDP. It
403 can be configured to avoid logging send errors (especially useful when
407 Sends the values collected by collectd to a web-server using HTTP POST
408 requests. The transmitted data is either in a form understood by the
409 Exec plugin or formatted in JSON.
412 Sends data to Apache Kafka, a distributed queue.
415 Sends data to MongoDB, a NoSQL database.
418 Sends the values to a Redis key-value database server.
421 Sends data to Riemann, a stream processing and monitoring system.
423 * Logging is, as everything in collectd, provided by plugins. The following
424 plugins keep up informed about what's going on:
427 Writes logmessages to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
430 Log messages are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
431 See collectd-perl(5).
434 It's possible to implement log plugins in Python using the python plugin.
435 See collectd-python(5) for details.
438 Logs to the standard UNIX logging mechanism, syslog.
440 * Notifications can be handled by the following plugins:
443 Send a desktop notification to a notification daemon, as defined in
444 the Desktop Notification Specification. To actually display the
445 notifications, notification-daemon is required.
446 See http://www.galago-project.org/specs/notification/.
449 Send an E-mail with the notification message to the configured
453 Execute a program or script to handle the notification.
454 See collectd-exec(5).
457 Writes the notification message to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
460 Send the notification to a remote host to handle it somehow.
463 Notifications are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
464 See collectd-perl(5).
467 It's possible to implement notification plugins in Python using the
468 python plugin. See collectd-python(5) for details.
470 * Value processing can be controlled using the "filter chain" infrastructure
471 and "matches" and "targets". The following plugins are available:
473 - match_empty_counter
474 Match counter values which are currently zero.
477 Match values using a hash function of the hostname.
480 Match values by their identifier based on regular expressions.
483 Match values with an invalid timestamp.
486 Select values by their data sources' values.
488 - target_notification
489 Create and dispatch a notification.
492 Replace parts of an identifier using regular expressions.
495 Scale (multiply) values by an arbitrary value.
498 Set (overwrite) entire parts of an identifier.
500 * Miscellaneous plugins:
503 Selects multiple value lists based on patterns or regular expressions
504 and creates new aggregated values lists from those.
507 Checks values against configured thresholds and creates notifications if
508 values are out of bounds. See collectd-threshold(5) for details.
511 Sets the hostname to an unique identifier. This is meant for setups
512 where each client may migrate to another physical host, possibly going
513 through one or more name changes in the process.
515 * Performance: Since collectd is running as a daemon it doesn't spend much
516 time starting up again and again. With the exception of the exec plugin no
517 processes are forked. Caching in output plugins, such as the rrdtool and
518 network plugins, makes sure your resources are used efficiently. Also,
519 since collectd is programmed multithreaded it benefits from hyperthreading
520 and multicore processors and makes sure that the daemon isn't idle if only
521 one plugin waits for an IO-operation to complete.
523 * Once set up, hardly any maintenance is necessary. Setup is kept as easy
524 as possible and the default values should be okay for most users.
530 * collectd's configuration file can be found at `sysconfdir'/collectd.conf.
531 Run `collectd -h' for a list of builtin defaults. See `collectd.conf(5)'
532 for a list of options and a syntax description.
534 * When the `csv' or `rrdtool' plugins are loaded they'll write the values to
535 files. The usual place for these files is beneath `/var/lib/collectd'.
537 * When using some of the plugins, collectd needs to run as user root, since
538 only root can do certain things, such as craft ICMP packages needed to ping
539 other hosts. collectd should NOT be installed setuid root since it can be
540 used to overwrite valuable files!
542 * Sample scripts to generate graphs reside in `contrib/' in the source
543 package or somewhere near `/usr/share/doc/collectd' in most distributions.
544 Please be aware that those script are meant as a starting point for your
545 own experiments.. Some of them require the `RRDs' Perl module.
546 (`librrds-perl' on Debian) If you have written a more sophisticated
547 solution please share it with us.
549 * The RRAs of the automatically created RRD files depend on the `step'
550 and `heartbeat' settings given. If change these settings you may need to
551 re-create the files, losing all data. Please be aware of that when changing
552 the values and read the rrdtool(1) manpage thoroughly.
555 collectd and chkrootkit
556 -----------------------
558 If you are using the `dns' plugin chkrootkit(1) will report collectd as a
559 packet sniffer ("<iface>: PACKET SNIFFER(/usr/sbin/collectd[<pid>])"). The
560 plugin captures all UDP packets on port 53 to analyze the DNS traffic. In
561 this case, collectd is a legitimate sniffer and the report should be
562 considered to be a false positive. However, you might want to check that
563 this really is collectd and not some other, illegitimate sniffer.
569 To compile collectd from source you will need:
571 * Usual suspects: C compiler, linker, preprocessor, make, ...
573 * A POSIX-threads (pthread) implementation.
574 Since gathering some statistics is slow (network connections, slow devices,
575 etc) collectd is parallelized. The POSIX threads interface is being
576 used and should be found in various implementations for hopefully all
579 * aerotools-ng (optional)
580 Used by the `aquaero' plugin. Currently, the `libaquaero5' library, which
581 is used by the `aerotools-ng' toolkit, is not compiled as a shared object
582 nor does it feature an installation routine. Therefore, you need to point
583 collectd's configure script at the source directory of the `aerotools-ng'
585 <https://github.com/lynix/aerotools-ng>
587 * CoreFoundation.framework and IOKit.framework (optional)
588 For compiling on Darwin in general and the `apple_sensors' plugin in
590 <http://developer.apple.com/corefoundation/>
592 * libclntsh (optional)
593 Used by the `oracle' plugin.
595 * libcredis (optional)
596 Used by the redis plugin. Please note that you require a 0.2.2 version
597 or higher. <http://code.google.com/p/credis/>
600 If you want to use the `apache', `ascent', `curl', `nginx', or `write_http'
602 <http://curl.haxx.se/>
605 Used by the `dbi' plugin to connect to various databases.
606 <http://libdbi.sourceforge.net/>
608 * libesmtp (optional)
609 For the `notify_email' plugin.
610 <http://www.stafford.uklinux.net/libesmtp/>
612 * libganglia (optional)
613 Used by the `gmond' plugin to process data received from Ganglia.
614 <http://ganglia.info/>
616 * libgcrypt (optional)
617 Used by the `network' plugin for encryption and authentication.
618 <http://www.gnupg.org/>
621 If present, the uuid plugin will check for UUID from HAL.
622 <http://hal.freedesktop.org/>
624 * libi2c-dev (optional)
625 Used for the plugin `barometer', provides just the i2c-dev.h header file for user space i2c development.
628 For querying iptables counters.
629 <http://netfilter.org/>
631 If not found on the system, a version shipped with this distribution can
632 be used. It requires some Linux headers in /usr/include/linux. You can
633 force the build system to use the shipped version by specifying
634 --with-libiptc=shipped
635 when running the configure script.
638 Library that encapsulates the `Java Virtual Machine' (JVM). This library is
639 used by the Java plugin to execute Java bytecode. See “Configuring with
641 <http://openjdk.java.net/> (and others)
643 * libmemcached (optional)
644 Used by the `memcachec' plugin to connect to a memcache daemon.
645 <http://tangent.org/552/libmemcached.html>
648 Used by the `netlink' plugin.
649 <http://www.netfilter.org/projects/libmnl/>
651 * libmodbus (optional)
652 Used by the “modbus” plugin to communicate with Modbus/TCP devices. The
653 “modbus” plugin works with version 2.0.3 of the library – due to frequent
654 API changes other versions may or may not compile cleanly.
655 <http://www.libmodbus.org/>
657 * libmysqlclient (optional)
658 Unsurprisingly used by the `mysql' plugin.
659 <http://dev.mysql.com/>
661 * libnetapp (optional)
662 Required for the “netapp” plugin.
663 This library is part of the “Manage ONTAP SDK” published by NetApp.
665 * libnetsnmp (optional)
666 For the `snmp' plugin.
667 <http://www.net-snmp.org/>
669 * libnotify (optional)
670 For the `notify_desktop' plugin.
671 <http://www.galago-project.org/>
673 * liboping (optional)
674 Used by the `ping' plugin to send and receive ICMP packets.
675 <http://octo.it/liboping/>
677 * libowcapi (optional)
678 Used by the `onewire' plugin to read values from onewire sensors (or the
680 <http://www.owfs.org/>
683 Used to capture packets by the `dns' plugin.
684 <http://www.tcpdump.org/>
686 * libperfstat (optional)
687 Used by various plugins to gather statistics under AIX.
690 Obviously used by the `perl' plugin. The library has to be compiled with
691 ithread support (introduced in Perl 5.6.0).
692 <http://www.perl.org/>
695 The PostgreSQL C client library used by the `postgresql' plugin.
696 <http://www.postgresql.org/>
698 * libprotobuf-c, protoc-c (optional)
699 Used by the `pinba' plugin to generate a parser for the network packets
700 sent by the Pinba PHP extension.
701 <http://code.google.com/p/protobuf-c/>
703 * libpython (optional)
704 Used by the `python' plugin. Currently, Python 2.3 and later and Python 3
706 <http://www.python.org/>
708 * librabbitmq (optional; also called “rabbitmq-c”)
709 Used by the AMQP plugin for AMQP connections, for example to RabbitMQ.
710 <http://hg.rabbitmq.com/rabbitmq-c/>
712 * librdkafka (optional; also called “rdkafka”)
713 Used by the Kafka plugin for producing.
714 <https://github.com/edenhill/librdkafka>
716 * librouteros (optional)
717 Used by the `routeros' plugin to connect to a device running `RouterOS'.
718 <http://octo.it/librouteros/>
721 Used by the `rrdtool' and `rrdcached' plugins. The latter requires RRDtool
722 client support which was added after version 1.3 of RRDtool. Versions 1.0,
723 1.2 and 1.3 are known to work with the `rrdtool' plugin.
724 <http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/>
726 * librt, libsocket, libkstat, libdevinfo (optional)
727 Various standard Solaris libraries which provide system functions.
728 <http://developers.sun.com/solaris/>
730 * libsensors (optional)
731 To read from `lm_sensors', see the `sensors' plugin.
732 <http://www.lm-sensors.org/>
734 * libsigrok (optional)
735 Used by the sigrok plugin. In addition, libsigrok depends on glib,
736 libzip, and optionally (depending on which drivers are enabled) on
737 libusb, libftdi and libudev.
739 * libstatgrab (optional)
740 Used by various plugins to collect statistics on systems other than Linux
742 <http://www.i-scream.org/libstatgrab/>
744 * libtokyotyrant (optional)
745 Used by the tokyotyrant plugin.
746 <http://1978th.net/tokyotyrant/>
748 * libupsclient/nut (optional)
749 For the `nut' plugin which queries nut's `upsd'.
750 <http://networkupstools.org/>
753 Collect statistics from virtual machines.
754 <http://libvirt.org/>
757 Parse XML data. This is needed for the `ascent' and `libvirt' plugins.
758 <http://xmlsoft.org/>
761 <http://www.xmms.org/>
764 Parse JSON data. This is needed for the `curl_json' plugin.
765 <http://github.com/lloyd/yajl>
767 * libvarnish (optional)
768 Fetches statistics from a Varnish instance. This is needed for the Varnish plugin
769 <http://varnish-cache.org>
771 Configuring / Compiling / Installing
772 ------------------------------------
774 To configure, build and install collectd with the default settings, run
775 `./configure && make && make install'. For detailed, generic instructions
776 see INSTALL. For a complete list of configure options and their description,
777 run `./configure --help'.
779 By default, the configure script will check for all build dependencies and
780 disable all plugins whose requirements cannot be fulfilled (any other plugin
781 will be enabled). To enable a plugin, install missing dependencies (see
782 section `Prerequisites' above) and rerun `configure'. If you specify the
783 `--enable-<plugin>' configure option, the script will fail if the depen-
784 dencies for the specified plugin are not met. In that case you can force the
785 plugin to be built using the `--enable-<plugin>=force' configure option.
786 This will most likely fail though unless you're working in a very unusual
787 setup and you really know what you're doing. If you specify the
788 `--disable-<plugin>' configure option, the plugin will not be built. If you
789 specify the `--enable-all-plugins' or `--disable-all-plugins' configure
790 options, all plugins will be enabled or disabled respectively by default.
791 Explicitly enabling or disabling a plugin overwrites the default for the
792 specified plugin. These options are meant for package maintainers and should
793 not be used in everyday situations.
795 By default, collectd will be installed into `/opt/collectd'. You can adjust
796 this setting by specifying the `--prefix' configure option - see INSTALL for
797 details. If you pass DESTDIR=<path> to `make install', <path> will be
798 prefixed to all installation directories. This might be useful when creating
799 packages for collectd.
801 Configuring with libjvm
802 -----------------------
804 To determine the location of the required files of a Java installation is not
805 an easy task, because the locations vary with your kernel (Linux, SunOS, …)
806 and with your architecture (x86, SPARC, …) and there is no ‘java-config’
807 script we could use. Configuration of the JVM library is therefore a bit
810 The easiest way to use the `--with-java=$JAVA_HOME' option, where
811 `$JAVA_HOME' is usually something like:
812 /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0.14
814 The configure script will then use find(1) to look for the following files:
820 If found, appropriate CPP-flags and LD-flags are set and the following
821 library checks succeed.
823 If this doesn't work for you, you have the possibility to specify CPP-flags,
824 C-flags and LD-flags for the ‘Java’ plugin by hand, using the following three
825 (environment) variables:
831 For example (shortened for demonstration purposes):
833 ./configure JAVA_CPPFLAGS="-I$JAVA_HOME/include -I$JAVA_HOME/include/linux"
835 Adding "-ljvm" to the JAVA_LDFLAGS is done automatically, you don't have to
841 To compile correctly collectd needs to be able to initialize static
842 variables to NAN (Not A Number). Some C libraries, especially the GNU
843 libc, have a problem with that.
845 Luckily, with GCC it's possible to work around that problem: One can define
846 NAN as being (0.0 / 0.0) and `isnan' as `f != f'. However, to test this
847 ``implementation'' the configure script needs to compile and run a short
848 test program. Obviously running a test program when doing a cross-
849 compilation is, well, challenging.
851 If you run into this problem, you can use the `--with-nan-emulation'
852 configure option to force the use of this implementation. We can't promise
853 that the compiled binary actually behaves as it should, but since NANs
854 are likely never passed to the libm you have a good chance to be lucky.
856 Likewise, collectd needs to know the layout of doubles in memory, in order
857 to craft uniform network packets over different architectures. For this, it
858 needs to know how to convert doubles into the memory layout used by x86. The
859 configure script tries to figure this out by compiling and running a few
860 small test programs. This is of course not possible when cross-compiling.
861 You can use the `--with-fp-layout' option to tell the configure script which
862 conversion method to assume. Valid arguments are:
864 * `nothing' (12345678 -> 12345678)
865 * `endianflip' (12345678 -> 87654321)
866 * `intswap' (12345678 -> 56781234)
872 For questions, bug reports, development information and basically all other
873 concerns please send an email to collectd's mailing list at
874 <list at collectd.org>.
876 For live discussion and more personal contact visit us in IRC, we're in
877 channel #collectd on freenode.
883 Florian octo Forster <octo at collectd.org>,
884 Sebastian tokkee Harl <sh at tokkee.org>,
885 and many contributors (see `AUTHORS').
887 Please send bug reports and patches to the mailing list, see `Contact'