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 (Sectors read/written, number of read/write actions, time spent doing IO)
26 - Harddisk temperatures
27 (Uhm, yeah, temperature of harddisks that is ;)
30 (Load average over the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes)
33 (Memory occupied by running processes, page cache, buffer cache and free)
36 (Which NFS command were called how often. Only NFSv2 and NFSv3 right now)
39 (Time to reach the default gateway or another given host)
42 (RX and TX of serial interfaces)
45 (System temperatured and fan rotation speeds)
48 (Pages swapped out onto harddisk or whatever is called `swap' by the OS..)
51 (Read and write bytes and operations on tape devices)
54 (In/Outbound traffic on the interfaces)
56 * Performance: Running as a daemon collectd doesn't spend much time in
57 startup. Since collectd links against libping, librrd and libsensors it
58 doesn't need to start any other processes.
60 * Hardly any maintenance neccessary and setup is trivial.
62 * Extremely easy and failsafe network operation possible.
68 * When running collectd writes system statistics in RRD-files. Per default
69 they reside in `/var/lib/collectd'.
71 * collectd needs to run as user root, since only root can craft ICMP
72 packages needed to ping other hosts. collectd should NOT be installed
73 setui root since it can be used to overwrite valuable files..
75 * Sample scripts to generate graphs reside in `contrib/' in the source
76 package or somewhere near `/usr/share/doc/collectd' in most distributions.
77 Please be aware that those script are meant as a starting point for your
78 own experiments.. Some of them require the `RRDs' Perl module.
79 (`librrds-perl' on Debian)
81 * The RRD-files that collectd creates hold the following data. Use ``rrdtool
82 resize'' if you want to cover longer/shorter periods of time.
84 Resolution | Data points | Timespan
85 -----------+-------------+----------
86 60 seconds | 1500 | 25 hours
87 30 minutes | 1680 | 35 days
88 6 hours | 1520 | 380 days
90 * Use `-c' to start in client-, `-s' to start in server-mode. Read the
97 To compile collectd from source you will need:
99 * Usual suspects: C compiler, linker, preprocessor, make, ...
101 * rrdtool (headers and library; rrdtool 1.0 and 1.2 both work fine)
102 If built without `librrd' the resulting binary will be `client only', i.e.
103 will send it's values via multicast and not create any RRD files itself.
105 * lm-sensors (optional)
107 * libstatgrab may be used to collect statistics on systems other than Linux
108 and/or Solaris. Note that CPU- and disk-statistics, while being provided by
109 this library, are not supported in collectd right now..
110 <http://www.i-scream.org/libstatgrab/>
115 Florian octo Forster <octo at verplant.org>