1 collectd - System information collection daemon
2 =================================================
3 http://verplant.org/collectd/
8 collectd is a small daemon which collects statistics about a computer's
9 usage and writes then into RRD files.
15 * collectd is able to collect the following data:
18 (Time spent in system, user, nice and idle)
21 (For laptops with speed step or a similar technology)
24 (Basically the values `df(1)' delivers)
27 (Sectors read/written, number of read/write actions, time spent doing IO)
29 - Harddisk temperatures
30 (Uhm, yeah, temperature of harddisks that is ;)
33 (Load average over the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes)
36 (Memory occupied by running processes, page cache, buffer cache and free)
38 - MySQL server statistics
39 (Commands issued, handlers triggered and traffic sent/received)
42 (Which NFS command were called how often. Only NFSv2 and NFSv3 right now)
45 (Time to reach the default gateway or another given host)
48 (Number of running, sleeping, zombie, ... processes)
51 (RX and TX of serial interfaces)
54 (System temperatured and fan rotation speeds)
57 (Pages swapped out onto harddisk or whatever is called `swap' by the OS..)
60 (Read and write bytes and operations on tape devices)
63 (In/Outbound traffic on the interfaces)
66 (Currently logged in users)
68 * Performance: Running as a daemon collectd doesn't spend much time in
69 startup. Since collectd links against libping, librrd and libsensors it
70 doesn't need to start any other processes.
72 * Hardly any maintenance neccessary and setup is trivial.
74 * Extremely easy and failsafe network operation possible.
80 * collectd's configuration file can be found at `sysconfdir'/collectd.conf.
81 Run `collectd -h' for a list of builtin defaults. See `collectd.conf(5)'
82 for a list of options and a syntax description.
84 * When running collectd writes system statistics in RRD-files. Per default
85 they reside in `/var/lib/collectd'.
87 * When using the `ping' plugin collectd needs to run as user root, since only
88 root can craft ICMP packages needed to ping other hosts. collectd should
89 NOT be installed setuid root since it can be used to overwrite valuable
92 * Sample scripts to generate graphs reside in `contrib/' in the source
93 package or somewhere near `/usr/share/doc/collectd' in most distributions.
94 Please be aware that those script are meant as a starting point for your
95 own experiments.. Some of them require the `RRDs' Perl module.
96 (`librrds-perl' on Debian)
98 * The RRD-files that collectd creates hold the following data. Use ``rrdtool
99 resize'' if you want to cover longer/shorter periods of time.
101 Resolution | Data points | Timespan
102 -----------+-------------+----------
103 60 seconds | 1500 | 25 hours
104 30 minutes | 1680 | 35 days
105 6 hours | 1520 | 380 days
111 To compile collectd from source you will need:
113 * Usual suspects: C compiler, linker, preprocessor, make, ...
115 * rrdtool (headers and library; rrdtool 1.0 and 1.2 both work fine)
116 If built without `librrd' the resulting binary will be `client only', i.e.
117 will send it's values via multicast and not create any RRD files itself.
119 * libmysqlclient (optional)
121 * lm-sensors (optional)
123 * libstatgrab may be used to collect statistics on systems other than Linux
124 and/or Solaris. Note that CPU- and disk-statistics, while being provided by
125 this library, are not supported in collectd right now..
126 <http://www.i-scream.org/libstatgrab/>
131 Florian octo Forster <octo at verplant.org>