1 collectd - System information collection daemon
2 =================================================
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:
17 - Apache server utilization
18 (Number of bytes transfered, number of requests handled and detailed
19 scoreboard statistics)
22 (UPS charge, load, input/output/battery voltage, etc)
25 (Temperature, fanspeed and voltage sensors of apple computers)
28 (Charge, current and charge of ACPI and PMU based batteries)
31 (Time spent in system, user, nice and idle)
34 (For laptops with speed step or a similar technology)
37 (Basically the values `df(1)' delivers)
40 (Sectors read/written, number of read/write actions, time spent doing IO)
42 - Harddisk temperatures
43 (Uhm, yeah, temperature of harddisks that is ;)
46 (Load average over the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes)
49 (Memory occupied by running processes, page cache, buffer cache and free)
51 - MySQL server statistics
52 (Commands issued, handlers triggered, thread usage, query cache
53 utilization and traffic sent/received)
56 (Which NFS command were called how often. Only NFSv2 and NFSv3 right now)
59 (Local clock drift, offset to peers, etc)
62 (Time to reach the default gateway or another given host)
65 (Number of running, sleeping, zombie, ... processes)
68 (System temperatured and fan rotation speeds)
71 (RX and TX of serial interfaces)
74 (Pages swapped out onto harddisk or whatever is called `swap' by the OS..)
77 (Read and write bytes and operations on tape devices)
80 (In/Outbound traffic on the interfaces)
83 (Currently logged in users)
86 (System ressources used by vservers)
89 (Link quality of wireless cards)
91 * Performance: Running as a daemon collectd doesn't spend much time in
92 startup. Since collectd links against libping, librrd and libsensors it
93 doesn't need to start any other processes.
95 * Hardly any maintenance neccessary and setup is trivial.
97 * Extremely easy and failsafe network operation possible.
103 * collectd's configuration file can be found at `sysconfdir'/collectd.conf.
104 Run `collectd -h' for a list of builtin defaults. See `collectd.conf(5)'
105 for a list of options and a syntax description.
107 * When running collectd writes system statistics in RRD-files. Per default
108 they reside in `/var/lib/collectd'.
110 * When using the `ping' plugin collectd needs to run as user root, since only
111 root can craft ICMP packages needed to ping other hosts. collectd should
112 NOT be installed setuid root since it can be used to overwrite valuable
115 * Sample scripts to generate graphs reside in `contrib/' in the source
116 package or somewhere near `/usr/share/doc/collectd' in most distributions.
117 Please be aware that those script are meant as a starting point for your
118 own experiments.. Some of them require the `RRDs' Perl module.
119 (`librrds-perl' on Debian)
121 * The RRAs of the automatically created RRD files depend on the `step'
122 and `heartbeat' settings given on compile time. For a list of the
123 default RRAs take a look in the collectd(1) manpage.
129 To compile collectd from source you will need:
131 * Usual suspects: C compiler, linker, preprocessor, make, ...
133 * rrdtool (headers and library; rrdtool 1.0 and 1.2 both work fine)
134 If built without `librrd' the resulting binary will be `client only', i.e.
135 will send it's values via multicast and not create any RRD files itself.
137 * libmysqlclient (optional)
139 * lm-sensors (optional)
141 * libstatgrab may be used to collect statistics on systems other than Linux
142 and/or Solaris. Note that CPU- and disk-statistics, while being provided by
143 this library, are not supported in collectd right now..
144 <http://www.i-scream.org/libstatgrab/>
147 If you want to use the `apache' plugin
149 * CoreFoundation.framework and IOKit.framework
150 For copiling on darwin in general and the `apple_sensors' plugin in
156 Florian octo Forster <octo at verplant.org>