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 Values gathered by a custom program or script.
91 Count the number of files in directories.
94 Linux file-system based caching framework statistics.
97 Receive multicast traffic from Ganglia instances.
100 Harddisk temperatures using hddtempd.
103 Interface traffic: Number of octets, packets and errors for each
107 Iptables' counters: Number of bytes that were matched by a certain
111 IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) sensors information.
114 IPVS connection statistics (number of connections, octets and packets
115 for each service and destination).
116 See http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/software/index.html.
119 IRQ counters: Frequency in which certain interrupts occur.
122 Integrates a `Java Virtual Machine' (JVM) to execute plugins in Java
123 bytecode. See “Configuring with libjvm” below.
126 System load average over the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes.
129 CPU, disk and network I/O statistics from virtual machines.
132 Queries very detailed usage statistics from wireless LAN adapters and
133 interfaces that use the Atheros chipset and the MadWifi driver.
136 Motherboard sensors: temperature, fanspeed and voltage information,
140 Query and parse data from a memcache daemon (memcached).
143 Statistics of the memcached distributed caching system.
144 <http://www.danga.com/memcached/>
147 Memory utilization: Memory occupied by running processes, page cache,
148 buffer cache and free.
151 Reads values from Modbus/TCP enabled devices. Supports reading values
152 from multiple "slaves" so gateway devices can be used.
155 Information provided by serial multimeters, such as the `Metex
159 MySQL server statistics: Commands issued, handlers triggered, thread
160 usage, query cache utilization and traffic/octets sent and received.
163 Plugin to query performance values from a NetApp storage system using the
164 “Manage ONTAP” SDK provided by NetApp.
167 Very detailed Linux network interface and routing statistics. You can get
168 (detailed) information on interfaces, qdiscs, classes, and, if you can
169 make use of it, filters.
172 Receive values that were collected by other hosts. Large setups will
173 want to collect the data on one dedicated machine, and this is the
174 plugin of choice for that.
177 NFS Procedures: Which NFS command were called how often. Only NFSv2 and
181 Collects statistics from `nginx' (speak: engine X), a HTTP and mail
185 NTP daemon statistics: Local clock drift, offset to peers, etc.
188 Network UPS tools: UPS current, voltage, power, charge, utilisation,
189 temperature, etc. See upsd(8).
192 Queries routing information from the “Optimized Link State Routing”
195 - onewire (EXPERIMENTAL!)
196 Read onewire sensors using the owcapu library of the owfs project.
197 Please read in collectd.conf(5) why this plugin is experimental.
200 RX and TX of each client in openvpn-status.log (status-version 2).
201 <http://openvpn.net/index.php/documentation/howto.html>
204 Query data from an Oracle database.
207 The perl plugin implements a Perl-interpreter into collectd. You can
208 write your own plugins in Perl and return arbitrary values using this
209 API. See collectd-perl(5).
212 Receive and dispatch timing values from Pinba, a profiling extension for
216 Network latency: Time to reach the default gateway or another given
220 PostgreSQL database statistics: active server connections, transaction
221 numbers, block IO, table row manipulations.
224 PowerDNS name server statistics.
227 Process counts: Number of running, sleeping, zombie, ... processes.
230 Counts various aspects of network protocols such as IP, TCP, UDP, etc.
233 The python plugin implements a Python interpreter into collectd. This
234 makes it possible to write plugins in Python which are executed by
235 collectd without the need to start a heavy interpreter every interval.
236 See collectd-python(5) for details.
239 Query interface and wireless registration statistics from RouterOS.
242 RRDtool caching daemon (RRDcacheD) statistics.
245 System sensors, accessed using lm_sensors: Voltages, temperatures and
249 RX and TX of serial interfaces. Linux only; needs root privileges.
252 Read values from SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) enabled
253 network devices such as switches, routers, thermometers, rack monitoring
254 servers, etc. See collectd-snmp(5).
257 Pages swapped out onto harddisk or whatever is called `swap' by the OS..
260 Parse table-like structured files.
263 Follows (tails) logfiles, parses them by lines and submits matched
267 Bytes and operations read and written on tape devices. Solaris only.
270 Number of TCP connections to specific local and remote ports.
273 TeamSpeak2 server statistics.
276 Plugin to read values from `The Energy Detective' (TED).
279 Linux ACPI thermal zone information.
282 Reads the number of records and file size from a running Tokyo Tyrant
286 System uptime statistics.
289 Users currently logged in.
292 Virtual memory statistics, e. g. the number of page-ins/-outs or the
293 number of pagefaults.
296 System resources used by Linux VServers.
297 See <http://linux-vserver.org/>.
300 Link quality of wireless cards. Linux only.
303 Bitrate and frequency of music played with XMMS.
306 Statistics for ZFS' “Adaptive Replacement Cache” (ARC).
308 * Output can be written or sent to various destinations by the following
312 Write to comma separated values (CSV) files. This needs lots of
313 diskspace but is extremely portable and can be analysed with almost
314 every program that can analyse anything. Even Microsoft's Excel..
317 Send the data to a remote host to save the data somehow. This is useful
318 for large setups where the data should be saved by a dedicated machine.
321 Of course the values are propagated to plugins written in Perl, too, so
322 you can easily do weird stuff with the plugins we didn't dare think of
323 ;) See collectd-perl(5).
326 It's possible to implement write plugins in Python using the python
327 plugin. See collectd-python(5) for details.
330 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using the RRDtool caching
331 daemon (RRDcacheD) - see rrdcached(1). That daemon provides a general
332 implementation of the caching done by the `rrdtool' plugin.
335 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using librrd. See rrdtool(1).
336 This is likely the most popular destination for such values. Since
337 updates to RRD-files are somewhat expensive this plugin can cache
338 updates to the files and write a bunch of updates at once, which lessens
342 One can query the values from the unixsock plugin whenever they're
343 needed. Please read collectd-unixsock(5) for a description on how that's
347 Sends the values collected by collectd to a web-server using HTTP POST
348 requests. The transmitted data is either in a form understood by the
349 Exec plugin or formatted in JSON.
351 * Logging is, as everything in collectd, provided by plugins. The following
352 plugins keep up informed about what's going on:
355 Writes logmessages to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
358 Log messages are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
359 See collectd-perl(5).
362 It's possible to implement log plugins in Python using the python plugin.
363 See collectd-python(5) for details.
366 Logs to the standard UNIX logging mechanism, syslog.
368 * Notifications can be handled by the following plugins:
371 Send a desktop notification to a notification daemon, as defined in
372 the Desktop Notification Specification. To actually display the
373 notifications, notification-daemon is required.
374 See http://www.galago-project.org/specs/notification/.
377 Send an E-mail with the notification message to the configured
381 Execute a program or script to handle the notification.
382 See collectd-exec(5).
385 Writes the notification message to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
388 Send the notification to a remote host to handle it somehow.
391 Notifications are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
392 See collectd-perl(5).
395 It's possible to implement notification plugins in Python using the
396 python plugin. See collectd-python(5) for details.
398 * Value processing can be controlled using the "filter chain" infrastructure
399 and "matches" and "targets". The following plugins are available:
401 - match_empty_counter
402 Match counter values which are currently zero.
405 Match values using a hash function of the hostname.
408 Match values by their identifier based on regular expressions.
411 Match values with an invalid timestamp.
414 Select values by their data sources' values.
416 - target_notification
417 Create and dispatch a notification.
420 Replace parts of an identifier using regular expressions.
423 Scale (multiply) values by an arbitrary value.
426 Set (overwrite) entire parts of an identifier.
428 * Miscellaneous plugins:
431 Sets the hostname to an unique identifier. This is meant for setups
432 where each client may migrate to another physical host, possibly going
433 through one or more name changes in the process.
435 * Performance: Since collectd is running as a daemon it doesn't spend much
436 time starting up again and again. With the exception of the exec plugin no
437 processes are forked. Caching in output plugins, such as the rrdtool and
438 network plugins, makes sure your resources are used efficiently. Also,
439 since collectd is programmed multithreaded it benefits from hyperthreading
440 and multicore processors and makes sure that the daemon isn't idle if only
441 one plugin waits for an IO-operation to complete.
443 * Once set up, hardly any maintenance is necessary. Setup is kept as easy
444 as possible and the default values should be okay for most users.
450 * collectd's configuration file can be found at `sysconfdir'/collectd.conf.
451 Run `collectd -h' for a list of builtin defaults. See `collectd.conf(5)'
452 for a list of options and a syntax description.
454 * When the `csv' or `rrdtool' plugins are loaded they'll write the values to
455 files. The usual place for these files is beneath `/var/lib/collectd'.
457 * When using some of the plugins, collectd needs to run as user root, since
458 only root can do certain things, such as craft ICMP packages needed to ping
459 other hosts. collectd should NOT be installed setuid root since it can be
460 used to overwrite valuable files!
462 * Sample scripts to generate graphs reside in `contrib/' in the source
463 package or somewhere near `/usr/share/doc/collectd' in most distributions.
464 Please be aware that those script are meant as a starting point for your
465 own experiments.. Some of them require the `RRDs' Perl module.
466 (`librrds-perl' on Debian) If you have written a more sophisticated
467 solution please share it with us.
469 * The RRAs of the automatically created RRD files depend on the `step'
470 and `heartbeat' settings given. If change these settings you may need to
471 re-create the files, losing all data. Please be aware of that when changing
472 the values and read the rrdtool(1) manpage thoroughly.
475 collectd and chkrootkit
476 -----------------------
478 If you are using the `dns' plugin chkrootkit(1) will report collectd as a
479 packet sniffer ("<iface>: PACKET SNIFFER(/usr/sbin/collectd[<pid>])"). The
480 plugin captures all UDP packets on port 53 to analyze the DNS traffic. In
481 this case, collectd is a legitimate sniffer and the report should be
482 considered to be a false positive. However, you might want to check that
483 this really is collectd and not some other, illegitimate sniffer.
489 To compile collectd from source you will need:
491 * Usual suspects: C compiler, linker, preprocessor, make, ...
493 * A POSIX-threads (pthread) implementation.
494 Since gathering some statistics is slow (network connections, slow devices,
495 etc) the collectd is parallelized. The POSIX threads interface is being
496 used and should be found in various implementations for hopefully all
499 * CoreFoundation.framework and IOKit.framework (optional)
500 For compiling on Darwin in general and the `apple_sensors' plugin in
502 <http://developer.apple.com/corefoundation/>
504 * libclntsh (optional)
505 Used by the `oracle' plugin.
508 If you want to use the `apache', `ascent', `curl', `nginx', or `write_http'
510 <http://curl.haxx.se/>
513 Used by the `dbi' plugin to connect to various databases.
514 <http://libdbi.sourceforge.net/>
516 * libesmtp (optional)
517 For the `notify_email' plugin.
518 <http://www.stafford.uklinux.net/libesmtp/>
520 * libganglia (optional)
521 Used by the `gmond' plugin to process data received from Ganglia.
522 <http://ganglia.info/>
524 * libgcrypt (optional)
525 Used by the `network' plugin for encryption and authentication.
526 <http://www.gnupg.org/>
529 If present, the uuid plugin will check for UUID from HAL.
530 <http://hal.freedesktop.org/>
533 For querying iptables counters.
534 <http://netfilter.org/>
536 If not found on the system, a version shipped with this distribution can
537 be used. It requires some Linux headers in /usr/include/linux. You can
538 force the build system to use the shipped version by specifying
539 --with-libiptc=shipped
540 when running the configure script.
543 Library that encapsulates the `Java Virtual Machine' (JVM). This library is
544 used by the Java plugin to execute Java bytecode. See “Configuring with
546 <http://openjdk.java.net/> (and others)
548 * libmemcached (optional)
549 Used by the `memcachec' plugin to connect to a memcache daemon.
550 <http://tangent.org/552/libmemcached.html>
552 * libmodbus (optional)
553 Used by the “modbus” plugin to communicate with Modbus/TCP devices. The
554 “modbus” plugin works with version 2.0.3 of the library – due to frequent
555 API changes other versions may or may not compile cleanly.
556 <http://www.libmodbus.org/>
558 * libmysqlclient (optional)
559 Unsurprisingly used by the `mysql' plugin.
560 <http://dev.mysql.com/>
562 * libnetapp (optional)
563 Required for the “netapp” plugin.
564 This library is part of the “Manage ONTAP SDK” published by NetApp.
566 * libnetlink (optional)
567 Used, obviously, for the `netlink' plugin.
568 <http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Net:Iproute2>
570 * libnetsnmp (optional)
571 For the `snmp' plugin.
572 <http://www.net-snmp.org/>
574 * libnotify (optional)
575 For the `notify_desktop' plugin.
576 <http://www.galago-project.org/>
578 * liboping (optional)
579 Used by the `ping' plugin to send and receive ICMP packets.
580 <http://verplant.org/liboping/>
582 * libowcapi (optional)
583 Used by the `onewire' plugin to read values from onewire sensors (or the
585 <http://www.owfs.org/>
588 Used to capture packets by the `dns' plugin.
589 <http://www.tcpdump.org/>
591 * libperfstat (optional)
592 Used by various plugins to gather statistics under AIX.
595 Obviously used by the `perl' plugin. The library has to be compiled with
596 ithread support (introduced in Perl 5.6.0).
597 <http://www.perl.org/>
600 The PostgreSQL C client library used by the `postgresql' plugin.
601 <http://www.postgresql.org/>
603 * libprotobuf-c, protoc-c (optional)
604 Used by the `pinba' plugin to generate a parser for the network packets
605 sent by the Pinba PHP extension.
606 <http://code.google.com/p/protobuf-c/>
608 * libpython (optional)
609 Used by the `python' plugin. Currently, Python 2.3 and later and Python 3
611 <http://www.python.org/>
613 * librouteros (optional)
614 Used by the `routeros' plugin to connect to a device running `RouterOS'.
615 <http://verplant.org/librouteros/>
618 Used by the `rrdtool' and `rrdcached' plugins. The latter requires RRDtool
619 client support which was added after version 1.3 of RRDtool. Versions 1.0,
620 1.2 and 1.3 are known to work with the `rrdtool' plugin.
621 <http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/>
623 * librt, libsocket, libkstat, libdevinfo (optional)
624 Various standard Solaris libraries which provide system functions.
625 <http://developers.sun.com/solaris/>
627 * libsensors (optional)
628 To read from `lm_sensors', see the `sensors' plugin.
629 <http://www.lm-sensors.org/>
631 * libstatgrab (optional)
632 Used by various plugins to collect statistics on systems other than Linux
634 <http://www.i-scream.org/libstatgrab/>
636 * libtokyotyrant (optional)
637 Used by the tokyotyrant plugin.
638 <http://1978th.net/tokyotyrant/>
640 * libupsclient/nut (optional)
641 For the `nut' plugin which queries nut's `upsd'.
642 <http://networkupstools.org/>
645 Collect statistics from virtual machines.
646 <http://libvirt.org/>
649 Parse XML data. This is needed for the `ascent' and `libvirt' plugins.
650 <http://xmlsoft.org/>
653 <http://www.xmms.org/>
656 Parse JSON data. This is needed for the `curl_json' plugin.
657 <http://github.com/lloyd/yajl>
659 Configuring / Compiling / Installing
660 ------------------------------------
662 To configure, build and install collectd with the default settings, run
663 `./configure && make && make install'. For detailed, generic instructions
664 see INSTALL. For a complete list of configure options and their description,
665 run `./configure --help'.
667 By default, the configure script will check for all build dependencies and
668 disable all plugins whose requirements cannot be fulfilled (any other plugin
669 will be enabled). To enable a plugin, install missing dependencies (see
670 section `Prerequisites' above) and rerun `configure'. If you specify the
671 `--enable-<plugin>' configure option, the script will fail if the depen-
672 dencies for the specified plugin are not met. In that case you can force the
673 plugin to be built using the `--enable-<plugin>=force' configure option.
674 This will most likely fail though unless you're working in a very unusual
675 setup and you really know what you're doing. If you specify the
676 `--disable-<plugin>' configure option, the plugin will not be built. If you
677 specify the `--enable-all-plugins' or `--disable-all-plugins' configure
678 options, all plugins will be enabled or disabled respectively by default.
679 Explicitly enabling or disabling a plugin overwrites the default for the
680 specified plugin. These options are meant for package maintainers and should
681 not be used in everyday situations.
683 By default, collectd will be installed into `/opt/collectd'. You can adjust
684 this setting by specifying the `--prefix' configure option - see INSTALL for
685 details. If you pass DESTDIR=<path> to `make install', <path> will be
686 prefixed to all installation directories. This might be useful when creating
687 packages for collectd.
689 Configuring with libjvm
690 -----------------------
692 To determine the location of the required files of a Java installation is not
693 an easy task, because the locations vary with your kernel (Linux, SunOS, …)
694 and with your architecture (x86, SPARC, …) and there is no ‘java-config’
695 script we could use. Configuration of the JVM library is therefore a bit
698 The easiest way to use the `--with-java=$JAVA_HOME' option, where
699 `$JAVA_HOME' is usually something like:
700 /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0.14
702 The configure script will then use find(1) to look for the following files:
708 If found, appropriate CPP-flags and LD-flags are set and the following
709 library checks succeed.
711 If this doesn't work for you, you have the possibility to specify CPP-flags,
712 C-flags and LD-flags for the ‘Java’ plugin by hand, using the following three
713 (environment) variables:
719 For example (shortened for demonstration purposes):
721 ./configure JAVA_CPPFLAGS="-I$JAVA_HOME/include -I$JAVA_HOME/include/linux"
723 Adding "-ljvm" to the JAVA_LDFLAGS is done automatically, you don't have to
729 To compile correctly collectd needs to be able to initialize static
730 variables to NAN (Not A Number). Some C libraries, especially the GNU
731 libc, have a problem with that.
733 Luckily, with GCC it's possible to work around that problem: One can define
734 NAN as being (0.0 / 0.0) and `isnan' as `f != f'. However, to test this
735 ``implementation'' the configure script needs to compile and run a short
736 test program. Obviously running a test program when doing a cross-
737 compilation is, well, challenging.
739 If you run into this problem, you can use the `--with-nan-emulation'
740 configure option to force the use of this implementation. We can't promise
741 that the compiled binary actually behaves as it should, but since NANs
742 are likely never passed to the libm you have a good chance to be lucky.
744 Likewise, collectd needs to know the layout of doubles in memory, in order
745 to craft uniform network packets over different architectures. For this, it
746 needs to know how to convert doubles into the memory layout used by x86. The
747 configure script tries to figure this out by compiling and running a few
748 small test programs. This is of course not possible when cross-compiling.
749 You can use the `--with-fp-layout' option to tell the configure script which
750 conversion method to assume. Valid arguments are:
752 * `nothing' (12345678 -> 12345678)
753 * `endianflip' (12345678 -> 87654321)
754 * `intswap' (12345678 -> 56781234)
760 For questions, bug reports, development information and basically all other
761 concerns please send an email to collectd's mailing list at
762 <collectd at verplant.org>.
764 For live discussion and more personal contact visit us in IRC, we're in
765 channel #collectd on freenode.
771 Florian octo Forster <octo at verplant.org>,
772 Sebastian tokkee Harl <sh at tokkee.org>,
773 and many contributors (see `AUTHORS').
775 Please send bug reports and patches to the mailing list, see `Contact'