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, disk and network I/O statistics from virtual machines.
139 Queries very detailed usage statistics from wireless LAN adapters and
140 interfaces that use the Atheros chipset and the MadWifi driver.
143 Motherboard sensors: temperature, fanspeed and voltage information,
147 Linux software-RAID device information (number of active, failed, spare
151 Query and parse data from a memcache daemon (memcached).
154 Statistics of the memcached distributed caching system.
155 <http://www.danga.com/memcached/>
158 Memory utilization: Memory occupied by running processes, page cache,
159 buffer cache and free.
162 Reads values from Modbus/TCP enabled devices. Supports reading values
163 from multiple "slaves" so gateway devices can be used.
166 Information provided by serial multimeters, such as the `Metex
170 MySQL server statistics: Commands issued, handlers triggered, thread
171 usage, query cache utilization and traffic/octets sent and received.
174 Plugin to query performance values from a NetApp storage system using the
175 “Manage ONTAP” SDK provided by NetApp.
178 Very detailed Linux network interface and routing statistics. You can get
179 (detailed) information on interfaces, qdiscs, classes, and, if you can
180 make use of it, filters.
183 Receive values that were collected by other hosts. Large setups will
184 want to collect the data on one dedicated machine, and this is the
185 plugin of choice for that.
188 NFS Procedures: Which NFS command were called how often. Only NFSv2 and
192 Collects statistics from `nginx' (speak: engine X), a HTTP and mail
196 NTP daemon statistics: Local clock drift, offset to peers, etc.
199 Network UPS tools: UPS current, voltage, power, charge, utilisation,
200 temperature, etc. See upsd(8).
203 Information about Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA).
206 Queries routing information from the “Optimized Link State Routing”
209 - onewire (EXPERIMENTAL!)
210 Read onewire sensors using the owcapu library of the owfs project.
211 Please read in collectd.conf(5) why this plugin is experimental.
214 RX and TX of each client in openvpn-status.log (status-version 2).
215 <http://openvpn.net/index.php/documentation/howto.html>
218 Query data from an Oracle database.
221 The perl plugin implements a Perl-interpreter into collectd. You can
222 write your own plugins in Perl and return arbitrary values using this
223 API. See collectd-perl(5).
226 Query statistics from BSD's packet filter "pf".
229 Receive and dispatch timing values from Pinba, a profiling extension for
233 Network latency: Time to reach the default gateway or another given
237 PostgreSQL database statistics: active server connections, transaction
238 numbers, block IO, table row manipulations.
241 PowerDNS name server statistics.
244 Process counts: Number of running, sleeping, zombie, ... processes.
247 Counts various aspects of network protocols such as IP, TCP, UDP, etc.
250 The python plugin implements a Python interpreter into collectd. This
251 makes it possible to write plugins in Python which are executed by
252 collectd without the need to start a heavy interpreter every interval.
253 See collectd-python(5) for details.
256 The redis plugin gathers information from a redis server, including:
257 uptime, used memory, total connections etc.
260 Query interface and wireless registration statistics from RouterOS.
263 RRDtool caching daemon (RRDcacheD) statistics.
266 System sensors, accessed using lm_sensors: Voltages, temperatures and
270 RX and TX of serial interfaces. Linux only; needs root privileges.
273 Read values from SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) enabled
274 network devices such as switches, routers, thermometers, rack monitoring
275 servers, etc. See collectd-snmp(5).
278 Pages swapped out onto harddisk or whatever is called `swap' by the OS..
281 Parse table-like structured files.
284 Follows (tails) logfiles, parses them by lines and submits matched
288 Bytes and operations read and written on tape devices. Solaris only.
291 Number of TCP connections to specific local and remote ports.
294 TeamSpeak2 server statistics.
297 Plugin to read values from `The Energy Detective' (TED).
300 Linux ACPI thermal zone information.
303 Reads the number of records and file size from a running Tokyo Tyrant
307 System uptime statistics.
310 Users currently logged in.
313 Various statistics from Varnish, an HTTP accelerator.
316 Virtual memory statistics, e. g. the number of page-ins/-outs or the
317 number of pagefaults.
320 System resources used by Linux VServers.
321 See <http://linux-vserver.org/>.
324 Link quality of wireless cards. Linux only.
327 Bitrate and frequency of music played with XMMS.
330 Statistics for ZFS' “Adaptive Replacement Cache” (ARC).
332 * Output can be written or sent to various destinations by the following
336 Sends JSON-encoded data to an Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP)
337 server, such as RabbitMQ.
340 Write to comma separated values (CSV) files. This needs lots of
341 diskspace but is extremely portable and can be analysed with almost
342 every program that can analyse anything. Even Microsoft's Excel..
345 Send the data to a remote host to save the data somehow. This is useful
346 for large setups where the data should be saved by a dedicated machine.
349 Of course the values are propagated to plugins written in Perl, too, so
350 you can easily do weird stuff with the plugins we didn't dare think of
351 ;) See collectd-perl(5).
354 It's possible to implement write plugins in Python using the python
355 plugin. See collectd-python(5) for details.
358 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using the RRDtool caching
359 daemon (RRDcacheD) - see rrdcached(1). That daemon provides a general
360 implementation of the caching done by the `rrdtool' plugin.
363 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using librrd. See rrdtool(1).
364 This is likely the most popular destination for such values. Since
365 updates to RRD-files are somewhat expensive this plugin can cache
366 updates to the files and write a bunch of updates at once, which lessens
370 One can query the values from the unixsock plugin whenever they're
371 needed. Please read collectd-unixsock(5) for a description on how that's
375 Sends data to Carbon, the storage layer of Graphite.
378 Sends the values collected by collectd to a web-server using HTTP POST
379 requests. The transmitted data is either in a form understood by the
380 Exec plugin or formatted in JSON.
383 Sends the values to a Redis key-value database server.
385 * Logging is, as everything in collectd, provided by plugins. The following
386 plugins keep up informed about what's going on:
389 Writes logmessages to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
392 Log messages are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
393 See collectd-perl(5).
396 It's possible to implement log plugins in Python using the python plugin.
397 See collectd-python(5) for details.
400 Logs to the standard UNIX logging mechanism, syslog.
402 * Notifications can be handled by the following plugins:
405 Send a desktop notification to a notification daemon, as defined in
406 the Desktop Notification Specification. To actually display the
407 notifications, notification-daemon is required.
408 See http://www.galago-project.org/specs/notification/.
411 Send an E-mail with the notification message to the configured
415 Execute a program or script to handle the notification.
416 See collectd-exec(5).
419 Writes the notification message to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
422 Send the notification to a remote host to handle it somehow.
425 Notifications are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
426 See collectd-perl(5).
429 It's possible to implement notification plugins in Python using the
430 python plugin. See collectd-python(5) for details.
432 * Value processing can be controlled using the "filter chain" infrastructure
433 and "matches" and "targets". The following plugins are available:
435 - match_empty_counter
436 Match counter values which are currently zero.
439 Match values using a hash function of the hostname.
442 Match values by their identifier based on regular expressions.
445 Match values with an invalid timestamp.
448 Select values by their data sources' values.
450 - target_notification
451 Create and dispatch a notification.
454 Replace parts of an identifier using regular expressions.
457 Scale (multiply) values by an arbitrary value.
460 Set (overwrite) entire parts of an identifier.
462 * Miscellaneous plugins:
465 Selects multiple value lists based on patterns or regular expressions
466 and creates new aggregated values lists from those.
469 Checks values against configured thresholds and creates notifications if
470 values are out of bounds. See collectd-threshold(5) for details.
473 Sets the hostname to an unique identifier. This is meant for setups
474 where each client may migrate to another physical host, possibly going
475 through one or more name changes in the process.
477 * Performance: Since collectd is running as a daemon it doesn't spend much
478 time starting up again and again. With the exception of the exec plugin no
479 processes are forked. Caching in output plugins, such as the rrdtool and
480 network plugins, makes sure your resources are used efficiently. Also,
481 since collectd is programmed multithreaded it benefits from hyperthreading
482 and multicore processors and makes sure that the daemon isn't idle if only
483 one plugin waits for an IO-operation to complete.
485 * Once set up, hardly any maintenance is necessary. Setup is kept as easy
486 as possible and the default values should be okay for most users.
492 * collectd's configuration file can be found at `sysconfdir'/collectd.conf.
493 Run `collectd -h' for a list of builtin defaults. See `collectd.conf(5)'
494 for a list of options and a syntax description.
496 * When the `csv' or `rrdtool' plugins are loaded they'll write the values to
497 files. The usual place for these files is beneath `/var/lib/collectd'.
499 * When using some of the plugins, collectd needs to run as user root, since
500 only root can do certain things, such as craft ICMP packages needed to ping
501 other hosts. collectd should NOT be installed setuid root since it can be
502 used to overwrite valuable files!
504 * Sample scripts to generate graphs reside in `contrib/' in the source
505 package or somewhere near `/usr/share/doc/collectd' in most distributions.
506 Please be aware that those script are meant as a starting point for your
507 own experiments.. Some of them require the `RRDs' Perl module.
508 (`librrds-perl' on Debian) If you have written a more sophisticated
509 solution please share it with us.
511 * The RRAs of the automatically created RRD files depend on the `step'
512 and `heartbeat' settings given. If change these settings you may need to
513 re-create the files, losing all data. Please be aware of that when changing
514 the values and read the rrdtool(1) manpage thoroughly.
517 collectd and chkrootkit
518 -----------------------
520 If you are using the `dns' plugin chkrootkit(1) will report collectd as a
521 packet sniffer ("<iface>: PACKET SNIFFER(/usr/sbin/collectd[<pid>])"). The
522 plugin captures all UDP packets on port 53 to analyze the DNS traffic. In
523 this case, collectd is a legitimate sniffer and the report should be
524 considered to be a false positive. However, you might want to check that
525 this really is collectd and not some other, illegitimate sniffer.
531 To compile collectd from source you will need:
533 * Usual suspects: C compiler, linker, preprocessor, make, ...
535 * A POSIX-threads (pthread) implementation.
536 Since gathering some statistics is slow (network connections, slow devices,
537 etc) the collectd is parallelized. The POSIX threads interface is being
538 used and should be found in various implementations for hopefully all
541 * CoreFoundation.framework and IOKit.framework (optional)
542 For compiling on Darwin in general and the `apple_sensors' plugin in
544 <http://developer.apple.com/corefoundation/>
546 * libclntsh (optional)
547 Used by the `oracle' plugin.
549 * libcredis (optional)
550 Used by the redis plugin. Please note that you require a 0.2.2 version
551 or higher. <http://code.google.com/p/credis/>
554 If you want to use the `apache', `ascent', `curl', `nginx', or `write_http'
556 <http://curl.haxx.se/>
559 Used by the `dbi' plugin to connect to various databases.
560 <http://libdbi.sourceforge.net/>
562 * libesmtp (optional)
563 For the `notify_email' plugin.
564 <http://www.stafford.uklinux.net/libesmtp/>
566 * libganglia (optional)
567 Used by the `gmond' plugin to process data received from Ganglia.
568 <http://ganglia.info/>
570 * libgcrypt (optional)
571 Used by the `network' plugin for encryption and authentication.
572 <http://www.gnupg.org/>
575 If present, the uuid plugin will check for UUID from HAL.
576 <http://hal.freedesktop.org/>
579 For querying iptables counters.
580 <http://netfilter.org/>
582 If not found on the system, a version shipped with this distribution can
583 be used. It requires some Linux headers in /usr/include/linux. You can
584 force the build system to use the shipped version by specifying
585 --with-libiptc=shipped
586 when running the configure script.
589 Library that encapsulates the `Java Virtual Machine' (JVM). This library is
590 used by the Java plugin to execute Java bytecode. See “Configuring with
592 <http://openjdk.java.net/> (and others)
594 * libmemcached (optional)
595 Used by the `memcachec' plugin to connect to a memcache daemon.
596 <http://tangent.org/552/libmemcached.html>
598 * libmodbus (optional)
599 Used by the “modbus” plugin to communicate with Modbus/TCP devices. The
600 “modbus” plugin works with version 2.0.3 of the library – due to frequent
601 API changes other versions may or may not compile cleanly.
602 <http://www.libmodbus.org/>
604 * libmysqlclient (optional)
605 Unsurprisingly used by the `mysql' plugin.
606 <http://dev.mysql.com/>
608 * libnetapp (optional)
609 Required for the “netapp” plugin.
610 This library is part of the “Manage ONTAP SDK” published by NetApp.
612 * libnetlink (optional)
613 Used, obviously, for the `netlink' plugin.
614 <http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Net:Iproute2>
616 * libnetsnmp (optional)
617 For the `snmp' plugin.
618 <http://www.net-snmp.org/>
620 * libnotify (optional)
621 For the `notify_desktop' plugin.
622 <http://www.galago-project.org/>
624 * liboping (optional)
625 Used by the `ping' plugin to send and receive ICMP packets.
626 <http://verplant.org/liboping/>
628 * libowcapi (optional)
629 Used by the `onewire' plugin to read values from onewire sensors (or the
631 <http://www.owfs.org/>
634 Used to capture packets by the `dns' plugin.
635 <http://www.tcpdump.org/>
637 * libperfstat (optional)
638 Used by various plugins to gather statistics under AIX.
641 Obviously used by the `perl' plugin. The library has to be compiled with
642 ithread support (introduced in Perl 5.6.0).
643 <http://www.perl.org/>
646 The PostgreSQL C client library used by the `postgresql' plugin.
647 <http://www.postgresql.org/>
649 * libprotobuf-c, protoc-c (optional)
650 Used by the `pinba' plugin to generate a parser for the network packets
651 sent by the Pinba PHP extension.
652 <http://code.google.com/p/protobuf-c/>
654 * libpython (optional)
655 Used by the `python' plugin. Currently, Python 2.3 and later and Python 3
657 <http://www.python.org/>
659 * librabbitmq (optional; also called “rabbitmq-c”)
660 Used by the AMQP plugin for AMQP connections, for example to RabbitMQ.
661 <http://hg.rabbitmq.com/rabbitmq-c/>
663 * librouteros (optional)
664 Used by the `routeros' plugin to connect to a device running `RouterOS'.
665 <http://verplant.org/librouteros/>
668 Used by the `rrdtool' and `rrdcached' plugins. The latter requires RRDtool
669 client support which was added after version 1.3 of RRDtool. Versions 1.0,
670 1.2 and 1.3 are known to work with the `rrdtool' plugin.
671 <http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/>
673 * librt, libsocket, libkstat, libdevinfo (optional)
674 Various standard Solaris libraries which provide system functions.
675 <http://developers.sun.com/solaris/>
677 * libsensors (optional)
678 To read from `lm_sensors', see the `sensors' plugin.
679 <http://www.lm-sensors.org/>
681 * libstatgrab (optional)
682 Used by various plugins to collect statistics on systems other than Linux
684 <http://www.i-scream.org/libstatgrab/>
686 * libtokyotyrant (optional)
687 Used by the tokyotyrant plugin.
688 <http://1978th.net/tokyotyrant/>
690 * libupsclient/nut (optional)
691 For the `nut' plugin which queries nut's `upsd'.
692 <http://networkupstools.org/>
695 Collect statistics from virtual machines.
696 <http://libvirt.org/>
699 Parse XML data. This is needed for the `ascent' and `libvirt' plugins.
700 <http://xmlsoft.org/>
703 <http://www.xmms.org/>
706 Parse JSON data. This is needed for the `curl_json' plugin.
707 <http://github.com/lloyd/yajl>
709 * libvarnish (optional)
710 Fetches statistics from a Varnish instance. This is needed for the Varnish plugin
711 <http://varnish-cache.org>
713 Configuring / Compiling / Installing
714 ------------------------------------
716 To configure, build and install collectd with the default settings, run
717 `./configure && make && make install'. For detailed, generic instructions
718 see INSTALL. For a complete list of configure options and their description,
719 run `./configure --help'.
721 By default, the configure script will check for all build dependencies and
722 disable all plugins whose requirements cannot be fulfilled (any other plugin
723 will be enabled). To enable a plugin, install missing dependencies (see
724 section `Prerequisites' above) and rerun `configure'. If you specify the
725 `--enable-<plugin>' configure option, the script will fail if the depen-
726 dencies for the specified plugin are not met. In that case you can force the
727 plugin to be built using the `--enable-<plugin>=force' configure option.
728 This will most likely fail though unless you're working in a very unusual
729 setup and you really know what you're doing. If you specify the
730 `--disable-<plugin>' configure option, the plugin will not be built. If you
731 specify the `--enable-all-plugins' or `--disable-all-plugins' configure
732 options, all plugins will be enabled or disabled respectively by default.
733 Explicitly enabling or disabling a plugin overwrites the default for the
734 specified plugin. These options are meant for package maintainers and should
735 not be used in everyday situations.
737 By default, collectd will be installed into `/opt/collectd'. You can adjust
738 this setting by specifying the `--prefix' configure option - see INSTALL for
739 details. If you pass DESTDIR=<path> to `make install', <path> will be
740 prefixed to all installation directories. This might be useful when creating
741 packages for collectd.
743 Configuring with libjvm
744 -----------------------
746 To determine the location of the required files of a Java installation is not
747 an easy task, because the locations vary with your kernel (Linux, SunOS, …)
748 and with your architecture (x86, SPARC, …) and there is no ‘java-config’
749 script we could use. Configuration of the JVM library is therefore a bit
752 The easiest way to use the `--with-java=$JAVA_HOME' option, where
753 `$JAVA_HOME' is usually something like:
754 /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0.14
756 The configure script will then use find(1) to look for the following files:
762 If found, appropriate CPP-flags and LD-flags are set and the following
763 library checks succeed.
765 If this doesn't work for you, you have the possibility to specify CPP-flags,
766 C-flags and LD-flags for the ‘Java’ plugin by hand, using the following three
767 (environment) variables:
773 For example (shortened for demonstration purposes):
775 ./configure JAVA_CPPFLAGS="-I$JAVA_HOME/include -I$JAVA_HOME/include/linux"
777 Adding "-ljvm" to the JAVA_LDFLAGS is done automatically, you don't have to
783 To compile correctly collectd needs to be able to initialize static
784 variables to NAN (Not A Number). Some C libraries, especially the GNU
785 libc, have a problem with that.
787 Luckily, with GCC it's possible to work around that problem: One can define
788 NAN as being (0.0 / 0.0) and `isnan' as `f != f'. However, to test this
789 ``implementation'' the configure script needs to compile and run a short
790 test program. Obviously running a test program when doing a cross-
791 compilation is, well, challenging.
793 If you run into this problem, you can use the `--with-nan-emulation'
794 configure option to force the use of this implementation. We can't promise
795 that the compiled binary actually behaves as it should, but since NANs
796 are likely never passed to the libm you have a good chance to be lucky.
798 Likewise, collectd needs to know the layout of doubles in memory, in order
799 to craft uniform network packets over different architectures. For this, it
800 needs to know how to convert doubles into the memory layout used by x86. The
801 configure script tries to figure this out by compiling and running a few
802 small test programs. This is of course not possible when cross-compiling.
803 You can use the `--with-fp-layout' option to tell the configure script which
804 conversion method to assume. Valid arguments are:
806 * `nothing' (12345678 -> 12345678)
807 * `endianflip' (12345678 -> 87654321)
808 * `intswap' (12345678 -> 56781234)
814 For questions, bug reports, development information and basically all other
815 concerns please send an email to collectd's mailing list at
816 <collectd at verplant.org>.
818 For live discussion and more personal contact visit us in IRC, we're in
819 channel #collectd on freenode.
825 Florian octo Forster <octo at verplant.org>,
826 Sebastian tokkee Harl <sh at tokkee.org>,
827 and many contributors (see `AUTHORS').
829 Please send bug reports and patches to the mailing list, see `Contact'