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 Number of nf_conntrack entries.
44 Number of context switches done by the operating system.
47 CPU utilization: Time spent in the system, user, nice, idle, and related
51 CPU frequency (For laptops with speed step or a similar technology)
54 Parse statistics from websites using regular expressions.
57 Retrieves JSON data via cURL and parses it according to user
61 Retrieves XML data via cURL and parses it according to user
65 Executes SQL statements on various databases and interprets the returned
69 Mountpoint usage (Basically the values `df(1)' delivers)
72 Disk utilization: Sectors read/written, number of read/write actions,
73 average time an IO-operation took to complete.
76 DNS traffic: Query types, response codes, opcodes and traffic/octets
80 Email statistics: Count, traffic, spam scores and checks.
81 See collectd-email(5).
84 Amount of entropy available to the system.
87 Network interface card statistics.
90 Values gathered by a custom program or script.
94 Count the number of files in directories.
97 Linux file-system based caching framework statistics.
100 Receive multicast traffic from Ganglia instances.
103 Harddisk temperatures using hddtempd.
106 Interface traffic: Number of octets, packets and errors for each
110 Iptables' counters: Number of bytes that were matched by a certain
114 IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) sensors information.
117 IPVS connection statistics (number of connections, octets and packets
118 for each service and destination).
119 See http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/software/index.html.
122 IRQ counters: Frequency in which certain interrupts occur.
125 Integrates a `Java Virtual Machine' (JVM) to execute plugins in Java
126 bytecode. See “Configuring with libjvm” below.
129 System load average over the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes.
132 Detailed CPU statistics of the “Logical Partitions” virtualization
133 technique built into IBM's POWER processors.
136 CPU, memory, disk and network I/O statistics from virtual machines.
139 Size of “Logical Volumes” (LV) and “Volume Groups” (VG) of Linux'
140 “Logical Volume Manager” (LVM).
143 Queries very detailed usage statistics from wireless LAN adapters and
144 interfaces that use the Atheros chipset and the MadWifi driver.
147 Motherboard sensors: temperature, fanspeed and voltage information,
151 Linux software-RAID device information (number of active, failed, spare
155 Query and parse data from a memcache daemon (memcached).
158 Statistics of the memcached distributed caching system.
159 <http://www.danga.com/memcached/>
162 Memory utilization: Memory occupied by running processes, page cache,
163 buffer cache and free.
166 Reads values from Modbus/TCP enabled devices. Supports reading values
167 from multiple "slaves" so gateway devices can be used.
170 Information provided by serial multimeters, such as the `Metex
174 MySQL server statistics: Commands issued, handlers triggered, thread
175 usage, query cache utilization and traffic/octets sent and received.
178 Plugin to query performance values from a NetApp storage system using the
179 “Manage ONTAP” SDK provided by NetApp.
182 Very detailed Linux network interface and routing statistics. You can get
183 (detailed) information on interfaces, qdiscs, classes, and, if you can
184 make use of it, filters.
187 Receive values that were collected by other hosts. Large setups will
188 want to collect the data on one dedicated machine, and this is the
189 plugin of choice for that.
192 NFS Procedures: Which NFS command were called how often. Only NFSv2 and
196 Collects statistics from `nginx' (speak: engine X), a HTTP and mail
200 NTP daemon statistics: Local clock drift, offset to peers, etc.
203 Network UPS tools: UPS current, voltage, power, charge, utilisation,
204 temperature, etc. See upsd(8).
207 Information about Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA).
210 Queries routing information from the “Optimized Link State Routing”
213 - onewire (EXPERIMENTAL!)
214 Read onewire sensors using the owcapu library of the owfs project.
215 Please read in collectd.conf(5) why this plugin is experimental.
218 RX and TX of each client in openvpn-status.log (status-version 2).
219 <http://openvpn.net/index.php/documentation/howto.html>
222 Query data from an Oracle database.
225 The perl plugin implements a Perl-interpreter into collectd. You can
226 write your own plugins in Perl and return arbitrary values using this
227 API. See collectd-perl(5).
230 Query statistics from BSD's packet filter "pf".
233 Receive and dispatch timing values from Pinba, a profiling extension for
237 Network latency: Time to reach the default gateway or another given
241 PostgreSQL database statistics: active server connections, transaction
242 numbers, block IO, table row manipulations.
245 PowerDNS name server statistics.
248 Process counts: Number of running, sleeping, zombie, ... processes.
251 Counts various aspects of network protocols such as IP, TCP, UDP, etc.
254 The python plugin implements a Python interpreter into collectd. This
255 makes it possible to write plugins in Python which are executed by
256 collectd without the need to start a heavy interpreter every interval.
257 See collectd-python(5) for details.
260 The redis plugin gathers information from a redis server, including:
261 uptime, used memory, total connections etc.
264 Query interface and wireless registration statistics from RouterOS.
267 RRDtool caching daemon (RRDcacheD) statistics.
270 System sensors, accessed using lm_sensors: Voltages, temperatures and
274 RX and TX of serial interfaces. Linux only; needs root privileges.
277 Read values from SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) enabled
278 network devices such as switches, routers, thermometers, rack monitoring
279 servers, etc. See collectd-snmp(5).
282 Pages swapped out onto harddisk or whatever is called `swap' by the OS..
285 Parse table-like structured files.
288 Follows (tails) logfiles, parses them by lines and submits matched
292 Follows (tails) files in CSV format, parses each line and submits
296 Bytes and operations read and written on tape devices. Solaris only.
299 Number of TCP connections to specific local and remote ports.
302 TeamSpeak2 server statistics.
305 Plugin to read values from `The Energy Detective' (TED).
308 Linux ACPI thermal zone information.
311 Reads the number of records and file size from a running Tokyo Tyrant
315 System uptime statistics.
318 Users currently logged in.
321 Various statistics from Varnish, an HTTP accelerator.
324 Virtual memory statistics, e. g. the number of page-ins/-outs or the
325 number of pagefaults.
328 System resources used by Linux VServers.
329 See <http://linux-vserver.org/>.
332 Link quality of wireless cards. Linux only.
335 Bitrate and frequency of music played with XMMS.
338 Statistics for ZFS' “Adaptive Replacement Cache” (ARC).
340 * Output can be written or sent to various destinations by the following
344 Sends JSON-encoded data to an Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP)
345 server, such as RabbitMQ.
348 Write to comma separated values (CSV) files. This needs lots of
349 diskspace but is extremely portable and can be analysed with almost
350 every program that can analyse anything. Even Microsoft's Excel..
353 Send the data to a remote host to save the data somehow. This is useful
354 for large setups where the data should be saved by a dedicated machine.
357 Of course the values are propagated to plugins written in Perl, too, so
358 you can easily do weird stuff with the plugins we didn't dare think of
359 ;) See collectd-perl(5).
362 It's possible to implement write plugins in Python using the python
363 plugin. See collectd-python(5) for details.
366 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using the RRDtool caching
367 daemon (RRDcacheD) - see rrdcached(1). That daemon provides a general
368 implementation of the caching done by the `rrdtool' plugin.
371 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using librrd. See rrdtool(1).
372 This is likely the most popular destination for such values. Since
373 updates to RRD-files are somewhat expensive this plugin can cache
374 updates to the files and write a bunch of updates at once, which lessens
378 One can query the values from the unixsock plugin whenever they're
379 needed. Please read collectd-unixsock(5) for a description on how that's
383 Sends data to Carbon, the storage layer of Graphite.
386 Sends the values collected by collectd to a web-server using HTTP POST
387 requests. The transmitted data is either in a form understood by the
388 Exec plugin or formatted in JSON.
391 Sends data to MongoDB, a NoSQL database.
394 Sends the values to a Redis key-value database server.
397 Sends data to Riemann, a stream processing and monitoring system.
399 * Logging is, as everything in collectd, provided by plugins. The following
400 plugins keep up informed about what's going on:
403 Writes logmessages to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
406 Log messages are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
407 See collectd-perl(5).
410 It's possible to implement log plugins in Python using the python plugin.
411 See collectd-python(5) for details.
414 Logs to the standard UNIX logging mechanism, syslog.
416 * Notifications can be handled by the following plugins:
419 Send a desktop notification to a notification daemon, as defined in
420 the Desktop Notification Specification. To actually display the
421 notifications, notification-daemon is required.
422 See http://www.galago-project.org/specs/notification/.
425 Send an E-mail with the notification message to the configured
429 Execute a program or script to handle the notification.
430 See collectd-exec(5).
433 Writes the notification message to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
436 Send the notification to a remote host to handle it somehow.
439 Notifications are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
440 See collectd-perl(5).
443 It's possible to implement notification plugins in Python using the
444 python plugin. See collectd-python(5) for details.
446 * Value processing can be controlled using the "filter chain" infrastructure
447 and "matches" and "targets". The following plugins are available:
449 - match_empty_counter
450 Match counter values which are currently zero.
453 Match values using a hash function of the hostname.
456 Match values by their identifier based on regular expressions.
459 Match values with an invalid timestamp.
462 Select values by their data sources' values.
464 - target_notification
465 Create and dispatch a notification.
468 Replace parts of an identifier using regular expressions.
471 Scale (multiply) values by an arbitrary value.
474 Set (overwrite) entire parts of an identifier.
476 * Miscellaneous plugins:
479 Selects multiple value lists based on patterns or regular expressions
480 and creates new aggregated values lists from those.
483 Checks values against configured thresholds and creates notifications if
484 values are out of bounds. See collectd-threshold(5) for details.
487 Sets the hostname to an unique identifier. This is meant for setups
488 where each client may migrate to another physical host, possibly going
489 through one or more name changes in the process.
491 * Performance: Since collectd is running as a daemon it doesn't spend much
492 time starting up again and again. With the exception of the exec plugin no
493 processes are forked. Caching in output plugins, such as the rrdtool and
494 network plugins, makes sure your resources are used efficiently. Also,
495 since collectd is programmed multithreaded it benefits from hyperthreading
496 and multicore processors and makes sure that the daemon isn't idle if only
497 one plugin waits for an IO-operation to complete.
499 * Once set up, hardly any maintenance is necessary. Setup is kept as easy
500 as possible and the default values should be okay for most users.
506 * collectd's configuration file can be found at `sysconfdir'/collectd.conf.
507 Run `collectd -h' for a list of builtin defaults. See `collectd.conf(5)'
508 for a list of options and a syntax description.
510 * When the `csv' or `rrdtool' plugins are loaded they'll write the values to
511 files. The usual place for these files is beneath `/var/lib/collectd'.
513 * When using some of the plugins, collectd needs to run as user root, since
514 only root can do certain things, such as craft ICMP packages needed to ping
515 other hosts. collectd should NOT be installed setuid root since it can be
516 used to overwrite valuable files!
518 * Sample scripts to generate graphs reside in `contrib/' in the source
519 package or somewhere near `/usr/share/doc/collectd' in most distributions.
520 Please be aware that those script are meant as a starting point for your
521 own experiments.. Some of them require the `RRDs' Perl module.
522 (`librrds-perl' on Debian) If you have written a more sophisticated
523 solution please share it with us.
525 * The RRAs of the automatically created RRD files depend on the `step'
526 and `heartbeat' settings given. If change these settings you may need to
527 re-create the files, losing all data. Please be aware of that when changing
528 the values and read the rrdtool(1) manpage thoroughly.
531 collectd and chkrootkit
532 -----------------------
534 If you are using the `dns' plugin chkrootkit(1) will report collectd as a
535 packet sniffer ("<iface>: PACKET SNIFFER(/usr/sbin/collectd[<pid>])"). The
536 plugin captures all UDP packets on port 53 to analyze the DNS traffic. In
537 this case, collectd is a legitimate sniffer and the report should be
538 considered to be a false positive. However, you might want to check that
539 this really is collectd and not some other, illegitimate sniffer.
545 To compile collectd from source you will need:
547 * Usual suspects: C compiler, linker, preprocessor, make, ...
549 * A POSIX-threads (pthread) implementation.
550 Since gathering some statistics is slow (network connections, slow devices,
551 etc) the collectd is parallelized. The POSIX threads interface is being
552 used and should be found in various implementations for hopefully all
555 * CoreFoundation.framework and IOKit.framework (optional)
556 For compiling on Darwin in general and the `apple_sensors' plugin in
558 <http://developer.apple.com/corefoundation/>
560 * libclntsh (optional)
561 Used by the `oracle' plugin.
563 * libcredis (optional)
564 Used by the redis plugin. Please note that you require a 0.2.2 version
565 or higher. <http://code.google.com/p/credis/>
568 If you want to use the `apache', `ascent', `curl', `nginx', or `write_http'
570 <http://curl.haxx.se/>
573 Used by the `dbi' plugin to connect to various databases.
574 <http://libdbi.sourceforge.net/>
576 * libesmtp (optional)
577 For the `notify_email' plugin.
578 <http://www.stafford.uklinux.net/libesmtp/>
580 * libganglia (optional)
581 Used by the `gmond' plugin to process data received from Ganglia.
582 <http://ganglia.info/>
584 * libgcrypt (optional)
585 Used by the `network' plugin for encryption and authentication.
586 <http://www.gnupg.org/>
589 If present, the uuid plugin will check for UUID from HAL.
590 <http://hal.freedesktop.org/>
593 For querying iptables counters.
594 <http://netfilter.org/>
596 If not found on the system, a version shipped with this distribution can
597 be used. It requires some Linux headers in /usr/include/linux. You can
598 force the build system to use the shipped version by specifying
599 --with-libiptc=shipped
600 when running the configure script.
603 Library that encapsulates the `Java Virtual Machine' (JVM). This library is
604 used by the Java plugin to execute Java bytecode. See “Configuring with
606 <http://openjdk.java.net/> (and others)
608 * libmemcached (optional)
609 Used by the `memcachec' plugin to connect to a memcache daemon.
610 <http://tangent.org/552/libmemcached.html>
612 * libmodbus (optional)
613 Used by the “modbus” plugin to communicate with Modbus/TCP devices. The
614 “modbus” plugin works with version 2.0.3 of the library – due to frequent
615 API changes other versions may or may not compile cleanly.
616 <http://www.libmodbus.org/>
618 * libmysqlclient (optional)
619 Unsurprisingly used by the `mysql' plugin.
620 <http://dev.mysql.com/>
622 * libnetapp (optional)
623 Required for the “netapp” plugin.
624 This library is part of the “Manage ONTAP SDK” published by NetApp.
626 * libnetlink (optional)
627 Used, obviously, for the `netlink' plugin.
628 <http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Net:Iproute2>
630 * libnetsnmp (optional)
631 For the `snmp' plugin.
632 <http://www.net-snmp.org/>
634 * libnotify (optional)
635 For the `notify_desktop' plugin.
636 <http://www.galago-project.org/>
638 * liboping (optional)
639 Used by the `ping' plugin to send and receive ICMP packets.
640 <http://verplant.org/liboping/>
642 * libowcapi (optional)
643 Used by the `onewire' plugin to read values from onewire sensors (or the
645 <http://www.owfs.org/>
648 Used to capture packets by the `dns' plugin.
649 <http://www.tcpdump.org/>
651 * libperfstat (optional)
652 Used by various plugins to gather statistics under AIX.
655 Obviously used by the `perl' plugin. The library has to be compiled with
656 ithread support (introduced in Perl 5.6.0).
657 <http://www.perl.org/>
660 The PostgreSQL C client library used by the `postgresql' plugin.
661 <http://www.postgresql.org/>
663 * libprotobuf-c, protoc-c (optional)
664 Used by the `pinba' plugin to generate a parser for the network packets
665 sent by the Pinba PHP extension.
666 <http://code.google.com/p/protobuf-c/>
668 * libpython (optional)
669 Used by the `python' plugin. Currently, Python 2.3 and later and Python 3
671 <http://www.python.org/>
673 * librabbitmq (optional; also called “rabbitmq-c”)
674 Used by the AMQP plugin for AMQP connections, for example to RabbitMQ.
675 <http://hg.rabbitmq.com/rabbitmq-c/>
677 * librouteros (optional)
678 Used by the `routeros' plugin to connect to a device running `RouterOS'.
679 <http://verplant.org/librouteros/>
682 Used by the `rrdtool' and `rrdcached' plugins. The latter requires RRDtool
683 client support which was added after version 1.3 of RRDtool. Versions 1.0,
684 1.2 and 1.3 are known to work with the `rrdtool' plugin.
685 <http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/>
687 * librt, libsocket, libkstat, libdevinfo (optional)
688 Various standard Solaris libraries which provide system functions.
689 <http://developers.sun.com/solaris/>
691 * libsensors (optional)
692 To read from `lm_sensors', see the `sensors' plugin.
693 <http://www.lm-sensors.org/>
695 * libstatgrab (optional)
696 Used by various plugins to collect statistics on systems other than Linux
698 <http://www.i-scream.org/libstatgrab/>
700 * libtokyotyrant (optional)
701 Used by the tokyotyrant plugin.
702 <http://1978th.net/tokyotyrant/>
704 * libupsclient/nut (optional)
705 For the `nut' plugin which queries nut's `upsd'.
706 <http://networkupstools.org/>
709 Collect statistics from virtual machines.
710 <http://libvirt.org/>
713 Parse XML data. This is needed for the `ascent' and `libvirt' plugins.
714 <http://xmlsoft.org/>
717 <http://www.xmms.org/>
720 Parse JSON data. This is needed for the `curl_json' plugin.
721 <http://github.com/lloyd/yajl>
723 * libvarnish (optional)
724 Fetches statistics from a Varnish instance. This is needed for the Varnish plugin
725 <http://varnish-cache.org>
727 Configuring / Compiling / Installing
728 ------------------------------------
730 To configure, build and install collectd with the default settings, run
731 `./configure && make && make install'. For detailed, generic instructions
732 see INSTALL. For a complete list of configure options and their description,
733 run `./configure --help'.
735 By default, the configure script will check for all build dependencies and
736 disable all plugins whose requirements cannot be fulfilled (any other plugin
737 will be enabled). To enable a plugin, install missing dependencies (see
738 section `Prerequisites' above) and rerun `configure'. If you specify the
739 `--enable-<plugin>' configure option, the script will fail if the depen-
740 dencies for the specified plugin are not met. In that case you can force the
741 plugin to be built using the `--enable-<plugin>=force' configure option.
742 This will most likely fail though unless you're working in a very unusual
743 setup and you really know what you're doing. If you specify the
744 `--disable-<plugin>' configure option, the plugin will not be built. If you
745 specify the `--enable-all-plugins' or `--disable-all-plugins' configure
746 options, all plugins will be enabled or disabled respectively by default.
747 Explicitly enabling or disabling a plugin overwrites the default for the
748 specified plugin. These options are meant for package maintainers and should
749 not be used in everyday situations.
751 By default, collectd will be installed into `/opt/collectd'. You can adjust
752 this setting by specifying the `--prefix' configure option - see INSTALL for
753 details. If you pass DESTDIR=<path> to `make install', <path> will be
754 prefixed to all installation directories. This might be useful when creating
755 packages for collectd.
757 Configuring with libjvm
758 -----------------------
760 To determine the location of the required files of a Java installation is not
761 an easy task, because the locations vary with your kernel (Linux, SunOS, …)
762 and with your architecture (x86, SPARC, …) and there is no ‘java-config’
763 script we could use. Configuration of the JVM library is therefore a bit
766 The easiest way to use the `--with-java=$JAVA_HOME' option, where
767 `$JAVA_HOME' is usually something like:
768 /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0.14
770 The configure script will then use find(1) to look for the following files:
776 If found, appropriate CPP-flags and LD-flags are set and the following
777 library checks succeed.
779 If this doesn't work for you, you have the possibility to specify CPP-flags,
780 C-flags and LD-flags for the ‘Java’ plugin by hand, using the following three
781 (environment) variables:
787 For example (shortened for demonstration purposes):
789 ./configure JAVA_CPPFLAGS="-I$JAVA_HOME/include -I$JAVA_HOME/include/linux"
791 Adding "-ljvm" to the JAVA_LDFLAGS is done automatically, you don't have to
797 To compile correctly collectd needs to be able to initialize static
798 variables to NAN (Not A Number). Some C libraries, especially the GNU
799 libc, have a problem with that.
801 Luckily, with GCC it's possible to work around that problem: One can define
802 NAN as being (0.0 / 0.0) and `isnan' as `f != f'. However, to test this
803 ``implementation'' the configure script needs to compile and run a short
804 test program. Obviously running a test program when doing a cross-
805 compilation is, well, challenging.
807 If you run into this problem, you can use the `--with-nan-emulation'
808 configure option to force the use of this implementation. We can't promise
809 that the compiled binary actually behaves as it should, but since NANs
810 are likely never passed to the libm you have a good chance to be lucky.
812 Likewise, collectd needs to know the layout of doubles in memory, in order
813 to craft uniform network packets over different architectures. For this, it
814 needs to know how to convert doubles into the memory layout used by x86. The
815 configure script tries to figure this out by compiling and running a few
816 small test programs. This is of course not possible when cross-compiling.
817 You can use the `--with-fp-layout' option to tell the configure script which
818 conversion method to assume. Valid arguments are:
820 * `nothing' (12345678 -> 12345678)
821 * `endianflip' (12345678 -> 87654321)
822 * `intswap' (12345678 -> 56781234)
828 For questions, bug reports, development information and basically all other
829 concerns please send an email to collectd's mailing list at
830 <collectd at verplant.org>.
832 For live discussion and more personal contact visit us in IRC, we're in
833 channel #collectd on freenode.
839 Florian octo Forster <octo at verplant.org>,
840 Sebastian tokkee Harl <sh at tokkee.org>,
841 and many contributors (see `AUTHORS').
843 Please send bug reports and patches to the mailing list, see `Contact'