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 Parse statistics from websites using regular expressions.
40 Name server and resolver statistics from the `statistics-channel'
41 interface of BIND 9.5, 9,6 and later.
44 CPU utilization: Time spent in the system, user, nice, idle, and related
48 CPU frequency (For laptops with speed step or a similar technology)
51 Executes SQL statements on various databases and interprets the returned
55 Mountpoint usage (Basically the values `df(1)' delivers)
58 Disk utilization: Sectors read/written, number of read/write actions,
59 average time an IO-operation took to complete.
62 DNS traffic: Query types, response codes, opcodes and traffic/octets
66 Email statistics: Count, traffic, spam scores and checks.
67 See collectd-email(5).
70 Amount of entropy available to the system.
73 Values gathered by a custom program or script.
77 Count the number of files in directories.
80 Harddisk temperatures using hddtempd.
83 Interface traffic: Number of octets, packets and errors for each
87 Iptables' counters: Number of bytes that were matched by a certain
91 IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) sensors information.
94 IPVS connection statistics (number of connections, octets and packets
95 for each service and destination).
96 See http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/software/index.html.
99 IRQ counters: Frequency in which certain interrupts occur.
102 System load average over the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes.
105 CPU, disk and network I/O statistics from virtual machines.
108 Motherboard sensors: temperature, fanspeed and voltage information,
112 Statistics of the memcached distributed caching system.
113 <http://www.danga.com/memcached/>
116 Memory utilization: Memory occupied by running processes, page cache,
117 buffer cache and free.
120 Information provided by serial multimeters, such as the `Metex
124 MySQL server statistics: Commands issued, handlers triggered, thread
125 usage, query cache utilization and traffic/octets sent and received.
128 Very detailed Linux network interface and routing statistics. You can get
129 (detailed) information on interfaces, qdiscs, classes, and, if you can
130 make use of it, filters.
133 Receive values that were collected by other hosts. Large setups will
134 want to collect the data on one dedicated machine, and this is the
135 plugin of choice for that.
138 NFS Procedures: Which NFS command were called how often. Only NFSv2 and
142 Collects statistics from `nginx' (speak: engine X), a HTTP and mail
146 NTP daemon statistics: Local clock drift, offset to peers, etc.
149 Network UPS tools: UPS current, voltage, power, charge, utilisation,
150 temperature, etc. See upsd(8).
152 - onewire (EXPERIMENTAL!)
153 Read onewire sensors using the owcapu library of the owfs project.
154 Please read in collectd.conf(5) why this plugin is experimental.
157 RX and TX of each client in openvpn-status.log (status-version 2).
158 <http://openvpn.net/index.php/documentation/howto.html>
161 Query data from an Oracle database.
164 The perl plugin implements a Perl-interpreter into collectd. You can
165 write your own plugins in Perl and return arbitrary values using this
166 API. See collectd-perl(5).
169 Network latency: Time to reach the default gateway or another given
173 PostgreSQL database statistics: active server connections, transaction
174 numbers, block IO, table row manipulations.
177 PowerDNS name server statistics.
180 Process counts: Number of running, sleeping, zombie, ... processes.
183 Counts various aspects of network protocols such as IP, TCP, UDP, etc.
186 RRDtool caching daemon (RRDcacheD) statistics.
189 System sensors, accessed using lm_sensors: Voltages, temperatures and
193 RX and TX of serial interfaces. Linux only; needs root privileges.
196 Read values from SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) enabled
197 network devices such as switches, routers, thermometers, rack monitoring
198 servers, etc. See collectd-snmp(5).
201 Pages swapped out onto harddisk or whatever is called `swap' by the OS..
204 Follows (tails) logfiles, parses them by lines and submits matched
208 Bytes and operations read and written on tape devices. Solaris only.
211 Number of TCP connections to specific local and remote ports.
214 TeamSpeak2 server statistics.
217 Linux ACPI thermal zone information.
220 Users currently logged in.
223 Virtual memory statistics, e. g. the number of page-ins/-outs or the
224 number of pagefaults.
227 System resources used by Linux VServers.
228 See <http://linux-vserver.org/>.
231 Link quality of wireless cards. Linux only.
234 Bitrate and frequency of music played with XMMS.
236 * Output can be written or send to various destinations by the following
240 Write to comma separated values (CSV) files. This needs lots of
241 diskspace but is extremely portable and can be analysed with almost
242 every program that can analyse anything. Even Microsoft's Excel..
245 Send the data to a remote host to save the data somehow. This is useful
246 for large setups where the data should be saved by a dedicated machine.
249 Of course the values are propagated to plugins written in Perl, too, so
250 you can easily do weird stuff with the plugins we didn't dare think of
251 ;) See collectd-perl(5).
254 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using the RRDtool caching
255 daemon (RRDcacheD) - see rrdcached(1). That daemon provides a general
256 implementation of the caching done by the `rrdtool' plugin.
259 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using librrd. See rrdtool(1).
260 This is likely the most popular destination for such values. Since
261 updates to RRD-files are somewhat expensive this plugin can cache
262 updates to the files and write a bunch of updates at once, which lessens
266 One can query the values from the unixsock plugin whenever they're
267 needed. Please read collectd-unixsock(5) for a description on how that's
270 * Logging is, as everything in collectd, provided by plugins. The following
271 plugins keep up informed about what's going on:
274 Writes logmessages to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
277 Log messages are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
278 See collectd-perl(5).
281 Logs to the standard UNIX logging mechanism, syslog.
283 * Notifications can be handled by the following plugins:
286 Send a desktop notification to a notification daemon, as defined in
287 the Desktop Notification Specification. To actually display the
288 notifications, notification-daemon is required.
289 See http://www.galago-project.org/specs/notification/.
292 Send an E-mail with the notification message to the configured
296 Execute a program or script to handle the notification.
297 See collectd-exec(5).
300 Writes the notification message to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
303 Send the notification to a remote host to handle it somehow.
306 Notifications are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
307 See collectd-perl(5).
309 * Value processing can be controlled using the "filter chain" infrastructure
310 and "matches" and "targets". The following plugins are available:
313 Match values by their identifier based on regular expressions.
316 Match values with an invalid timestamp.
319 Select values by their data sources' values.
321 - target_notification
322 Create and dispatch a notification.
325 Replace parts of an identifier using regular expressions.
328 Set (overwrite) entire parts of an identifier.
330 * Miscellaneous plugins:
333 Sets the hostname to an unique identifier. This is meant for setups
334 where each client may migrate to another physical host, possibly going
335 through one or more name changes in the process.
337 * Performance: Since collectd is running as a daemon it doesn't spend much
338 time starting up again and again. With the exception of the exec plugin no
339 processes are forked. Caching in output plugins, such as the rrdtool and
340 network plugins, makes sure your resources are used efficiently. Also,
341 since collectd is programmed multithreaded it benefits from hyperthreading
342 and multicore processors and makes sure that the daemon isn't idle if only
343 one plugins waits for an IO-operation to complete.
345 * Once set up, hardly any maintenance is necessary. Setup is kept as easy
346 as possible and the default values should be okay for most users.
352 * collectd's configuration file can be found at `sysconfdir'/collectd.conf.
353 Run `collectd -h' for a list of builtin defaults. See `collectd.conf(5)'
354 for a list of options and a syntax description.
356 * When the `csv' or `rrdtool' plugins are loaded they'll write the values to
357 files. The usual place for these files is beneath `/var/lib/collectd'.
359 * When using some of the plugins, collectd needs to run as user root, since
360 only root can do certain things, such as craft ICMP packages needed to ping
361 other hosts. collectd should NOT be installed setuid root since it can be
362 used to overwrite valuable files!
364 * Sample scripts to generate graphs reside in `contrib/' in the source
365 package or somewhere near `/usr/share/doc/collectd' in most distributions.
366 Please be aware that those script are meant as a starting point for your
367 own experiments.. Some of them require the `RRDs' Perl module.
368 (`librrds-perl' on Debian) If you have written a more sophisticated
369 solution please share it with us.
371 * The RRAs of the automatically created RRD files depend on the `step'
372 and `heartbeat' settings given. If change these settings you may need to
373 re-create the files, losing all data. Please be aware of that when changing
374 the values and read the rrdtool(1) manpage thoroughly.
377 collectd and chkrootkit
378 -----------------------
380 If you are using the `dns' plugin chkrootkit(1) will report collectd as a
381 packet sniffer ("<iface>: PACKET SNIFFER(/usr/sbin/collectd[<pid>])"). The
382 plugin captures all UDP packets on port 53 to analyze the DNS traffic. In
383 this case, collectd is a legitimate sniffer and the report should be
384 considered to be a false positive. However, you might want to check that
385 this really is collectd and not some other, illegitimate sniffer.
391 To compile collectd from source you will need:
393 * Usual suspects: C compiler, linker, preprocessor, make, ...
395 * A POSIX-threads (pthread) implementation.
396 Since gathering some statistics is slow (network connections, slow devices,
397 etc) the collectd is parallelized. The POSIX threads interface is being
398 used and should be found in various implementations for hopefully all
401 * CoreFoundation.framework and IOKit.framework (optional)
402 For compiling on Darwin in general and the `apple_sensors' plugin in
404 <http://developer.apple.com/corefoundation/>
406 * libclntsh (optional)
407 Used by the `oracle' plugin.
410 If you want to use the `apache', `ascent', `curl' or `nginx' plugin.
411 <http://curl.haxx.se/>
414 Used by the `dbi' plugin to connect to various databases.
415 <http://libdbi.sourceforge.net/>
417 * libesmtp (optional)
418 For the `notify_email' plugin.
419 <http://www.stafford.uklinux.net/libesmtp/>
422 If present, the uuid plugin will check for UUID from HAL.
423 <http://hal.freedesktop.org/>
425 * libiptc (optional, if not found a version shipped with this distribution
426 can be used if the Linux kernel headers are available)
427 For querying iptables counters.
428 <http://netfilter.org/>
430 * libmysqlclient (optional)
431 Unsurprisingly used by the `mysql' plugin.
432 <http://dev.mysql.com/>
434 * libnetlink (optional)
435 Used, obviously, for the `netlink' plugin.
436 <http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Net:Iproute2>
438 * libnetsnmp (optional)
439 For the `snmp' plugin.
440 <http://www.net-snmp.org/>
442 * libnotify (optional)
443 For the `notify_desktop' plugin.
444 <http://www.galago-project.org/>
446 * liboping (optional, if not found a version shipped with this distribution
448 Used by the `ping' plugin to send and receive ICMP packets.
449 <http://verplant.org/liboping/>
451 * libowcapi (optional)
452 Used by the `onewire' plugin to read values from onewire sensors (or the
454 <http://www.owfs.org/>
457 Used to capture packets by the `dns' plugin.
458 <http://www.tcpdump.org/>
461 Obviously used by the `perl' plugin. The library has to be compiled with
462 ithread support (introduced in Perl 5.6.0).
463 <http://www.perl.org/>
466 The PostgreSQL C client library used by the `postgresql' plugin.
467 <http://www.postgresql.org/>
470 Used by the `rrdtool' and `rrdcached' plugins. The latter requires RRDtool
471 client support which was added after version 1.3 of RRDtool. Versions 1.0,
472 1.2 and 1.3 are known to work with the `rrdtool' plugin.
473 <http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/>
475 * librt, libsocket, libkstat, libdevinfo (optional)
476 Various standard Solaris libraries which provide system functions.
477 <http://developers.sun.com/solaris/>
479 * libsensors (optional)
480 To read from `lm_sensors', see the `sensors' plugin.
481 <http://www.lm-sensors.org/>
483 * libstatgrab (optional)
484 Used by various plugins to collect statistics on systems other than Linux
486 <http://www.i-scream.org/libstatgrab/>
488 * libupsclient/nut (optional)
489 For the `nut' plugin which queries nut's `upsd'.
490 <http://networkupstools.org/>
493 Collect statistics from virtual machines.
494 <http://libvirt.org/>
497 Parse XML data. This is needed for the `ascent' and `libvirt' plugins.
498 <http://xmlsoft.org/>
501 <http://www.xmms.org/>
504 Configuring / Compiling / Installing
505 ------------------------------------
507 To configure, build and install collectd with the default settings, run
508 `./configure && make && make install'. For detailed, generic instructions
509 see INSTALL. For a complete list of configure options and their description,
510 run `./configure --help'.
512 By default, the configure script will check for all build dependencies and
513 disable all plugins whose requirements cannot be fulfilled (any other plugin
514 will be enabled). To enable a plugin, install missing dependencies (see
515 section `Prerequisites' above) and rerun `configure'. If you specify the
516 `--enable-<plugin>' configure option, the script will fail if the depen-
517 dencies for the specified plugin are not met. If you specify the
518 `--disable-<plugin>' configure option, the plugin will not be built. Both
519 options are meant for package maintainers and should not be used in everyday
522 By default, collectd will be installed into `/opt/collectd'. You can adjust
523 this setting by specifying the `--prefix' configure option - see INSTALL for
524 details. If you pass DESTDIR=<path> to `make install', <path> will be
525 prefixed to all installation directories. This might be useful when creating
526 packages for collectd.
532 To compile correctly collectd needs to be able to initialize static
533 variables to NAN (Not A Number). Some C libraries, especially the GNU
534 libc, have a problem with that.
536 Luckily, with GCC it's possible to work around that problem: One can define
537 NAN as being (0.0 / 0.0) and `isnan' as `f != f'. However, to test this
538 ``implementation'' the configure script needs to compile and run a short
539 test program. Obviously running a test program when doing a cross-
540 compilation is, well, challenging.
542 If you run into this problem, you can use the `--with-nan-emulation'
543 configure option to force the use of this implementation. We can't promise
544 that the compiled binary actually behaves as it should, but since NANs
545 are likely never passed to the libm you have a good chance to be lucky.
551 For questions, bugreports, development information and basically all other
552 concerns please send an email to collectd's mailinglist at
553 <collectd at verplant.org>.
555 For live discussion and more personal contact visit us in IRC, we're in
556 channel #collectd on freenode.
562 Florian octo Forster <octo at verplant.org>,
563 Sebastian tokkee Harl <sh at tokkee.org>,
564 and many contributors (see `AUTHORS').
566 Please send bugreports and patches to the mailinglist, see `Contact' above.