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 Various statistics from Varnish, an HTTP accelerator.
295 Virtual memory statistics, e. g. the number of page-ins/-outs or the
296 number of pagefaults.
299 System resources used by Linux VServers.
300 See <http://linux-vserver.org/>.
303 Link quality of wireless cards. Linux only.
306 Bitrate and frequency of music played with XMMS.
309 Statistics for ZFS' “Adaptive Replacement Cache” (ARC).
311 * Output can be written or sent to various destinations by the following
315 Write to comma separated values (CSV) files. This needs lots of
316 diskspace but is extremely portable and can be analysed with almost
317 every program that can analyse anything. Even Microsoft's Excel..
320 Send the data to a remote host to save the data somehow. This is useful
321 for large setups where the data should be saved by a dedicated machine.
324 Of course the values are propagated to plugins written in Perl, too, so
325 you can easily do weird stuff with the plugins we didn't dare think of
326 ;) See collectd-perl(5).
329 It's possible to implement write plugins in Python using the python
330 plugin. See collectd-python(5) for details.
333 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using the RRDtool caching
334 daemon (RRDcacheD) - see rrdcached(1). That daemon provides a general
335 implementation of the caching done by the `rrdtool' plugin.
338 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using librrd. See rrdtool(1).
339 This is likely the most popular destination for such values. Since
340 updates to RRD-files are somewhat expensive this plugin can cache
341 updates to the files and write a bunch of updates at once, which lessens
345 One can query the values from the unixsock plugin whenever they're
346 needed. Please read collectd-unixsock(5) for a description on how that's
350 Sends the values collected by collectd to a web-server using HTTP POST
351 requests. The transmitted data is either in a form understood by the
352 Exec plugin or formatted in JSON.
354 * Logging is, as everything in collectd, provided by plugins. The following
355 plugins keep up informed about what's going on:
358 Writes logmessages to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
361 Log messages are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
362 See collectd-perl(5).
365 It's possible to implement log plugins in Python using the python plugin.
366 See collectd-python(5) for details.
369 Logs to the standard UNIX logging mechanism, syslog.
371 * Notifications can be handled by the following plugins:
374 Send a desktop notification to a notification daemon, as defined in
375 the Desktop Notification Specification. To actually display the
376 notifications, notification-daemon is required.
377 See http://www.galago-project.org/specs/notification/.
380 Send an E-mail with the notification message to the configured
384 Execute a program or script to handle the notification.
385 See collectd-exec(5).
388 Writes the notification message to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
391 Send the notification to a remote host to handle it somehow.
394 Notifications are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
395 See collectd-perl(5).
398 It's possible to implement notification plugins in Python using the
399 python plugin. See collectd-python(5) for details.
401 * Value processing can be controlled using the "filter chain" infrastructure
402 and "matches" and "targets". The following plugins are available:
404 - match_empty_counter
405 Match counter values which are currently zero.
408 Match values using a hash function of the hostname.
411 Match values by their identifier based on regular expressions.
414 Match values with an invalid timestamp.
417 Select values by their data sources' values.
419 - target_notification
420 Create and dispatch a notification.
423 Replace parts of an identifier using regular expressions.
426 Scale (multiply) values by an arbitrary value.
429 Set (overwrite) entire parts of an identifier.
431 * Miscellaneous plugins:
434 Sets the hostname to an unique identifier. This is meant for setups
435 where each client may migrate to another physical host, possibly going
436 through one or more name changes in the process.
438 * Performance: Since collectd is running as a daemon it doesn't spend much
439 time starting up again and again. With the exception of the exec plugin no
440 processes are forked. Caching in output plugins, such as the rrdtool and
441 network plugins, makes sure your resources are used efficiently. Also,
442 since collectd is programmed multithreaded it benefits from hyperthreading
443 and multicore processors and makes sure that the daemon isn't idle if only
444 one plugin waits for an IO-operation to complete.
446 * Once set up, hardly any maintenance is necessary. Setup is kept as easy
447 as possible and the default values should be okay for most users.
453 * collectd's configuration file can be found at `sysconfdir'/collectd.conf.
454 Run `collectd -h' for a list of builtin defaults. See `collectd.conf(5)'
455 for a list of options and a syntax description.
457 * When the `csv' or `rrdtool' plugins are loaded they'll write the values to
458 files. The usual place for these files is beneath `/var/lib/collectd'.
460 * When using some of the plugins, collectd needs to run as user root, since
461 only root can do certain things, such as craft ICMP packages needed to ping
462 other hosts. collectd should NOT be installed setuid root since it can be
463 used to overwrite valuable files!
465 * Sample scripts to generate graphs reside in `contrib/' in the source
466 package or somewhere near `/usr/share/doc/collectd' in most distributions.
467 Please be aware that those script are meant as a starting point for your
468 own experiments.. Some of them require the `RRDs' Perl module.
469 (`librrds-perl' on Debian) If you have written a more sophisticated
470 solution please share it with us.
472 * The RRAs of the automatically created RRD files depend on the `step'
473 and `heartbeat' settings given. If change these settings you may need to
474 re-create the files, losing all data. Please be aware of that when changing
475 the values and read the rrdtool(1) manpage thoroughly.
478 collectd and chkrootkit
479 -----------------------
481 If you are using the `dns' plugin chkrootkit(1) will report collectd as a
482 packet sniffer ("<iface>: PACKET SNIFFER(/usr/sbin/collectd[<pid>])"). The
483 plugin captures all UDP packets on port 53 to analyze the DNS traffic. In
484 this case, collectd is a legitimate sniffer and the report should be
485 considered to be a false positive. However, you might want to check that
486 this really is collectd and not some other, illegitimate sniffer.
492 To compile collectd from source you will need:
494 * Usual suspects: C compiler, linker, preprocessor, make, ...
496 * A POSIX-threads (pthread) implementation.
497 Since gathering some statistics is slow (network connections, slow devices,
498 etc) the collectd is parallelized. The POSIX threads interface is being
499 used and should be found in various implementations for hopefully all
502 * CoreFoundation.framework and IOKit.framework (optional)
503 For compiling on Darwin in general and the `apple_sensors' plugin in
505 <http://developer.apple.com/corefoundation/>
507 * libclntsh (optional)
508 Used by the `oracle' plugin.
511 If you want to use the `apache', `ascent', `curl', `nginx', or `write_http'
513 <http://curl.haxx.se/>
516 Used by the `dbi' plugin to connect to various databases.
517 <http://libdbi.sourceforge.net/>
519 * libesmtp (optional)
520 For the `notify_email' plugin.
521 <http://www.stafford.uklinux.net/libesmtp/>
523 * libganglia (optional)
524 Used by the `gmond' plugin to process data received from Ganglia.
525 <http://ganglia.info/>
527 * libgcrypt (optional)
528 Used by the `network' plugin for encryption and authentication.
529 <http://www.gnupg.org/>
532 If present, the uuid plugin will check for UUID from HAL.
533 <http://hal.freedesktop.org/>
536 For querying iptables counters.
537 <http://netfilter.org/>
539 If not found on the system, a version shipped with this distribution can
540 be used. It requires some Linux headers in /usr/include/linux. You can
541 force the build system to use the shipped version by specifying
542 --with-libiptc=shipped
543 when running the configure script.
546 Library that encapsulates the `Java Virtual Machine' (JVM). This library is
547 used by the Java plugin to execute Java bytecode. See “Configuring with
549 <http://openjdk.java.net/> (and others)
551 * libmemcached (optional)
552 Used by the `memcachec' plugin to connect to a memcache daemon.
553 <http://tangent.org/552/libmemcached.html>
555 * libmodbus (optional)
556 Used by the `modbus' plugin to communicate with Modbus/TCP devices.
557 <https://launchpad.net/libmodbus>
559 * libmysqlclient (optional)
560 Unsurprisingly used by the `mysql' plugin.
561 <http://dev.mysql.com/>
563 * libnetapp (optional)
564 Required for the “netapp” plugin.
565 This library is part of the “Manage ONTAP SDK” published by NetApp.
567 * libnetlink (optional)
568 Used, obviously, for the `netlink' plugin.
569 <http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Net:Iproute2>
571 * libnetsnmp (optional)
572 For the `snmp' plugin.
573 <http://www.net-snmp.org/>
575 * libnotify (optional)
576 For the `notify_desktop' plugin.
577 <http://www.galago-project.org/>
579 * liboping (optional)
580 Used by the `ping' plugin to send and receive ICMP packets.
581 <http://verplant.org/liboping/>
583 * libowcapi (optional)
584 Used by the `onewire' plugin to read values from onewire sensors (or the
586 <http://www.owfs.org/>
589 Used to capture packets by the `dns' plugin.
590 <http://www.tcpdump.org/>
593 Obviously used by the `perl' plugin. The library has to be compiled with
594 ithread support (introduced in Perl 5.6.0).
595 <http://www.perl.org/>
598 The PostgreSQL C client library used by the `postgresql' plugin.
599 <http://www.postgresql.org/>
601 * libprotobuf-c, protoc-c (optional)
602 Used by the `pinba' plugin to generate a parser for the network packets
603 sent by the Pinba PHP extension.
604 <http://code.google.com/p/protobuf-c/>
606 * libpython (optional)
607 Used by the `python' plugin. Currently, only 2.3 ≦ Python < 3 is supported.
608 <http://www.python.org/>
610 * librouteros (optional)
611 Used by the `routeros' plugin to connect to a device running `RouterOS'.
612 <http://verplant.org/librouteros/>
615 Used by the `rrdtool' and `rrdcached' plugins. The latter requires RRDtool
616 client support which was added after version 1.3 of RRDtool. Versions 1.0,
617 1.2 and 1.3 are known to work with the `rrdtool' plugin.
618 <http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/>
620 * librt, libsocket, libkstat, libdevinfo (optional)
621 Various standard Solaris libraries which provide system functions.
622 <http://developers.sun.com/solaris/>
624 * libsensors (optional)
625 To read from `lm_sensors', see the `sensors' plugin.
626 <http://www.lm-sensors.org/>
628 * libstatgrab (optional)
629 Used by various plugins to collect statistics on systems other than Linux
631 <http://www.i-scream.org/libstatgrab/>
633 * libtokyotyrant (optional)
634 Used by the tokyotyrant plugin.
635 <http://1978th.net/tokyotyrant/>
637 * libupsclient/nut (optional)
638 For the `nut' plugin which queries nut's `upsd'.
639 <http://networkupstools.org/>
642 Collect statistics from virtual machines.
643 <http://libvirt.org/>
646 Parse XML data. This is needed for the `ascent' and `libvirt' plugins.
647 <http://xmlsoft.org/>
650 <http://www.xmms.org/>
653 Parse JSON data. This is needed for the `curl_json' plugin.
654 <http://github.com/lloyd/yajl>
656 * libvarnish (optional)
657 Fetches statistics from a Varnish instance. This is needed for the Varnish plugin
658 <http://varnish-cache.org>
660 Configuring / Compiling / Installing
661 ------------------------------------
663 To configure, build and install collectd with the default settings, run
664 `./configure && make && make install'. For detailed, generic instructions
665 see INSTALL. For a complete list of configure options and their description,
666 run `./configure --help'.
668 By default, the configure script will check for all build dependencies and
669 disable all plugins whose requirements cannot be fulfilled (any other plugin
670 will be enabled). To enable a plugin, install missing dependencies (see
671 section `Prerequisites' above) and rerun `configure'. If you specify the
672 `--enable-<plugin>' configure option, the script will fail if the depen-
673 dencies for the specified plugin are not met. In that case you can force the
674 plugin to be built using the `--enable-<plugin>=force' configure option.
675 This will most likely fail though unless you're working in a very unusual
676 setup and you really know what you're doing. If you specify the
677 `--disable-<plugin>' configure option, the plugin will not be built. If you
678 specify the `--enable-all-plugins' or `--disable-all-plugins' configure
679 options, all plugins will be enabled or disabled respectively by default.
680 Explicitly enabling or disabling a plugin overwrites the default for the
681 specified plugin. These options are meant for package maintainers and should
682 not be used in everyday situations.
684 By default, collectd will be installed into `/opt/collectd'. You can adjust
685 this setting by specifying the `--prefix' configure option - see INSTALL for
686 details. If you pass DESTDIR=<path> to `make install', <path> will be
687 prefixed to all installation directories. This might be useful when creating
688 packages for collectd.
690 Configuring with libjvm
691 -----------------------
693 To determine the location of the required files of a Java installation is not
694 an easy task, because the locations vary with your kernel (Linux, SunOS, …)
695 and with your architecture (x86, SPARC, …) and there is no ‘java-config’
696 script we could use. Configuration of the JVM library is therefore a bit
699 The easiest way to use the `--with-java=$JAVA_HOME' option, where
700 `$JAVA_HOME' is usually something like:
701 /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0.14
703 The configure script will then use find(1) to look for the following files:
709 If found, appropriate CPP-flags and LD-flags are set and the following
710 library checks succeed.
712 If this doesn't work for you, you have the possibility to specify CPP-flags,
713 C-flags and LD-flags for the ‘Java’ plugin by hand, using the following three
714 (environment) variables:
720 For example (shortened for demonstration purposes):
722 ./configure JAVA_CPPFLAGS="-I$JAVA_HOME/include -I$JAVA_HOME/include/linux"
724 Adding "-ljvm" to the JAVA_LDFLAGS is done automatically, you don't have to
730 To compile correctly collectd needs to be able to initialize static
731 variables to NAN (Not A Number). Some C libraries, especially the GNU
732 libc, have a problem with that.
734 Luckily, with GCC it's possible to work around that problem: One can define
735 NAN as being (0.0 / 0.0) and `isnan' as `f != f'. However, to test this
736 ``implementation'' the configure script needs to compile and run a short
737 test program. Obviously running a test program when doing a cross-
738 compilation is, well, challenging.
740 If you run into this problem, you can use the `--with-nan-emulation'
741 configure option to force the use of this implementation. We can't promise
742 that the compiled binary actually behaves as it should, but since NANs
743 are likely never passed to the libm you have a good chance to be lucky.
745 Likewise, collectd needs to know the layout of doubles in memory, in order
746 to craft uniform network packets over different architectures. For this, it
747 needs to know how to convert doubles into the memory layout used by x86. The
748 configure script tries to figure this out by compiling and running a few
749 small test programs. This is of course not possible when cross-compiling.
750 You can use the `--with-fp-layout' option to tell the configure script which
751 conversion method to assume. Valid arguments are:
753 * `nothing' (12345678 -> 12345678)
754 * `endianflip' (12345678 -> 87654321)
755 * `intswap' (12345678 -> 56781234)
761 For questions, bug reports, development information and basically all other
762 concerns please send an email to collectd's mailing list at
763 <collectd at verplant.org>.
765 For live discussion and more personal contact visit us in IRC, we're in
766 channel #collectd on freenode.
772 Florian octo Forster <octo at verplant.org>,
773 Sebastian tokkee Harl <sh at tokkee.org>,
774 and many contributors (see `AUTHORS').
776 Please send bug reports and patches to the mailing list, see `Contact'