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 CPU utilization: Time spent in the system, user, nice, idle, and related
41 CPU frequency (For laptops with speed step or a similar technology)
44 Mountpoint usage (Basically the values `df(1)' delivers)
47 Disk utilization: Sectors read/written, number of read/write actions,
48 average time an IO-operation took to complete.
51 DNS traffic: Query types, response codes, opcodes and traffic/octets
55 Email statistics: Count, traffic, spam scores and checks.
56 See collectd-email(5).
59 Amount of entropy available to the system.
62 Values gathered by a custom program or script.
66 Harddisk temperatures using hddtempd.
69 Interface traffic: Number of octets, packets and errors for each
73 Iptables' counters: Number of bytes that were matched by a certain
77 IPVS connection statistics (number of connections, octets and packets
78 for each service and destination).
79 See http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/software/index.html.
82 IRQ counters: Frequency in which certain interrupts occur.
85 System load average over the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes.
88 CPU, disk and network I/O statistics from virtual machines.
91 Motherboard sensors: temperature, fanspeed and voltage information,
95 Statistics of the memcached distributed caching system.
96 <http://www.danga.com/memcached/>
99 Memory utilization: Memory occupied by running processes, page cache,
100 buffer cache and free.
103 Information provided by serial multimeters, such as the `Metex
107 MySQL server statistics: Commands issued, handlers triggered, thread
108 usage, query cache utilization and traffic/octets sent and received.
111 Very detailed Linux network interface and routing statistics. You can get
112 (detailed) information on interfaces, qdiscs, classes, and, if you can
113 make use of it, filters.
116 Receive values that were collected by other hosts. Large setups will
117 want to collect the data on one dedicated machine, and this is the
118 plugin of choice for that.
121 NFS Procedures: Which NFS command were called how often. Only NFSv2 and
125 Collects statistics from `nginx' (speak: engine X), a HTTP and mail
129 NTP daemon statistics: Local clock drift, offset to peers, etc.
132 Network UPS tools: UPS current, voltage, power, charge, utilisation,
133 temperature, etc. See upsd(8).
136 The perl plugin implements a Perl-interpreter into collectd. You can
137 write your own plugins in Perl and return arbitrary values using this
138 API. See collectd-perl(5).
141 Network latency: Time to reach the default gateway or another given
145 PostgreSQL database statistics: active server connections, transaction
146 numbers, block IO, table row manipulations.
149 Process counts: Number of running, sleeping, zombie, ... processes.
152 System sensors, accessed using lm_sensors: Voltages, temperatures and
156 RX and TX of serial interfaces. Linux only; needs root privileges.
159 Read values from SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) enabled
160 network devices such as switches, routers, thermometers, rack monitoring
161 servers, etc. See collectd-snmp(5).
164 Pages swapped out onto harddisk or whatever is called `swap' by the OS..
167 Follows (tails) logfiles, parses them by lines and submits matched
171 Bytes and operations read and written on tape devices. Solaris only.
174 Number of TCP connections to specific local and remote ports.
177 Users currently logged in.
180 Virtual memory statistics, e. g. the number of page-ins/-outs or the
181 number of pagefaults.
184 System resources used by Linux VServers.
185 See <http://linux-vserver.org/>.
188 Link quality of wireless cards. Linux only.
191 Bitrate and frequency of music played with XMMS.
193 * Output can be written or send to various destinations by the following
197 Write to comma separated values (CSV) files. This needs lots of
198 diskspace but is extremely portable and can be analysed with almost
199 every program that can analyse anything. Even Microsoft's Excel..
202 Send the data to a remote host to save the data somehow. This is useful
203 for large setups where the data should be saved by a dedicated machine.
206 Of course the values are propagated to plugins written in Perl, too, so
207 you can easily do weird stuff with the plugins we didn't dare think of
208 ;) See collectd-perl(5).
211 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using librrd. See rrdtool(1).
212 This is likely the most popular destination for such values. Since
213 updates to RRD-files are somewhat expensive this plugin can cache
214 updates to the files and write a bunch of updates at once, which lessens
218 One can query the values from the unixsock plugin whenever they're
219 needed. Please read collectd-unixsock(5) for a description on how that's
222 * Logging is, as everything in collectd, provided by plugins. The following
223 plugins keep up informed about what's going on:
226 Writes logmessages to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
229 Log messages are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
230 See collectd-perl(5).
233 Logs to the standard UNIX logging mechanism, syslog.
235 * Notifications can be handled by the following plugins:
238 Send a desktop notification to a notification daemon, as defined in
239 the Desktop Notification Specification. To actually display the
240 notifications, notification-daemon is required.
241 See http://www.galago-project.org/specs/notification/.
244 Send an E-mail with the notification message to the configured
248 Execute a program or script to handle the notification.
249 See collectd-exec(5).
252 Writes the notification message to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
255 Send the notification to a remote host to handle it somehow.
258 Notifications are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
259 See collectd-perl(5).
261 * Miscellaneous plugins:
264 Sets the hostname to an unique identifier. This is meant for setups
265 where each client may migrate to another physical host, possibly going
266 through one or more name changes in the process.
268 * Performance: Since collectd is running as a daemon it doesn't spend much
269 time starting up again and again. With the exception of the exec plugin no
270 processes are forked. Caching in output plugins, such as the rrdtool and
271 network plugins, makes sure your resources are used efficiently. Also,
272 since collectd is programmed multithreaded it benefits from hyperthreading
273 and multicore processors and makes sure that the daemon isn't idle if only
274 one plugins waits for an IO-operation to complete.
276 * Once set up, hardly any maintenance is necessary. Setup is kept as easy
277 as possible and the default values should be okay for most users.
283 * collectd's configuration file can be found at `sysconfdir'/collectd.conf.
284 Run `collectd -h' for a list of builtin defaults. See `collectd.conf(5)'
285 for a list of options and a syntax description.
287 * When the `csv' or `rrdtool' plugins are loaded they'll write the values to
288 files. The usual place for these files is beneath `/var/lib/collectd'.
290 * When using some of the plugins, collectd needs to run as user root, since
291 only root can do certain things, such as craft ICMP packages needed to ping
292 other hosts. collectd should NOT be installed setuid root since it can be
293 used to overwrite valuable files!
295 * Sample scripts to generate graphs reside in `contrib/' in the source
296 package or somewhere near `/usr/share/doc/collectd' in most distributions.
297 Please be aware that those script are meant as a starting point for your
298 own experiments.. Some of them require the `RRDs' Perl module.
299 (`librrds-perl' on Debian) If you have written a more sophisticated
300 solution please share it with us.
302 * The RRAs of the automatically created RRD files depend on the `step'
303 and `heartbeat' settings given. If change these settings you may need to
304 re-create the files, losing all data. Please be aware of that when changing
305 the values and read the rrdtool(1) manpage thoroughly.
308 collectd and chkrootkit
309 -----------------------
311 If you are using the `dns' plugin chkrootkit(1) will report collectd as a
312 packet sniffer ("<iface>: PACKET SNIFFER(/usr/sbin/collectd[<pid>])"). The
313 plugin captures all UDP packets on port 53 to analyze the DNS traffic. In
314 this case, collectd is a legitimate sniffer and the report should be
315 considered to be a false positive. However, you might want to check that
316 this really is collectd and not some other, illegitimate sniffer.
322 To compile collectd from source you will need:
324 * Usual suspects: C compiler, linker, preprocessor, make, ...
326 * A POSIX-threads (pthread) implementation.
327 Since gathering some statistics is slow (network connections, slow devices,
328 etc) the collectd is parallelized. The POSIX threads interface is being
329 used and should be found in various implementations for hopefully all
332 * CoreFoundation.framework and IOKit.framework (optional)
333 For compiling on Darwin in general and the `apple_sensors' plugin in
337 If you want to use the `apache', `ascent', or `nginx' plugin.
339 * libesmtp (optional)
340 For the `notify_email' plugin.
343 If present, the uuid plugin will check for UUID from HAL.
346 For querying iptables counters.
348 * libmysqlclient (optional)
349 Unsurprisingly used by the `mysql' plugin.
351 * libnetlink (optional)
352 Used, obviously, for the `netlink' plugin.
354 * libnetsnmp (optional)
355 For the `snmp' plugin.
357 * libnotify (optional)
358 For the `notify_desktop' plugin.
360 * liboping (optional, if not found a version shipped with this distribution
362 Used by the `ping' plugin to send and receive ICMP packets.
365 Used to capture packets by the `dns' plugin.
368 Obviously used by the `perl' plugin. The library has to be compiled with
369 ithread support (introduced in Perl 5.6.0).
372 The PostgreSQL C client library used by the `postgresql' plugin.
374 * librrd (optional; headers and library; rrdtool 1.0 and 1.2 both work fine)
375 If built without `librrd' the resulting binary will be `client only', i.e.
376 will send its values via multicast and not create any RRD files itself.
377 Alternatively you can chose to write CSV-files (Comma Separated Values)
380 * librt, libsocket, libkstat, libdevinfo (optional)
381 Various standard Solaris libraries which provide system functions.
383 * libsensors (optional)
384 To read from `lm_sensors', see the `sensors' plugin.
386 * libstatgrab (optional) may be used to collect statistics on systems other
387 than Linux and/or Solaris. Note that CPU- and disk-statistics, while being
388 provided by this library, are not supported in collectd right now..
389 <http://www.i-scream.org/libstatgrab/>
391 * libupsclient/nut (optional)
392 For the `nut' plugin which queries nut's `upsd'.
395 Collect statistics from virtual machines.
398 Parse XML data. This is needed for the `ascent' and `libvirt' plugins.
403 Configuring / Compiling / Installing
404 ------------------------------------
406 To configure, build and install collectd with the default settings, run
407 `./configure && make && make install'. For detailed, generic instructions
408 see INSTALL. For a complete list of configure options and their description,
409 run `./configure --help'.
411 By default, the configure script will check for all build dependencies and
412 disable all plugins whose requirements cannot be fulfilled (any other plugin
413 will be enabled). To enable a plugin, install missing dependencies (see
414 section `Prerequisites' above) and rerun `configure'. If you specify the
415 `--enable-<plugin>' configure option, you can force the plugin to be built.
416 This will most likely fail though unless you're working in a very unusual
417 setup and you really know what you're doing.
419 By default, collectd will be installed into `/opt/collectd'. You can adjust
420 this setting by specifying the `--prefix' configure option - see INSTALL for
421 details. If you pass DESTDIR=<path> to `make install', <path> will be
422 prefixed to all installation directories. This might be useful when creating
423 packages for collectd.
429 To compile correctly collectd needs to be able to initialize static
430 variables to NAN (Not A Number). Some C libraries, especially the GNU
431 libc, have a problem with that.
433 Luckily, with GCC it's possible to work around that problem: One can define
434 NAN as being (0.0 / 0.0) and `isnan' as `f != f'. However, to test this
435 ``implementation'' the configure script needs to compile and run a short
436 test program. Obviously running a test program when doing a cross-
437 compilation is, well, challenging.
439 If you run into this problem, you can use the `--with-nan-emulation'
440 configure option to force the use of this implementation. We can't promise
441 that the compiled binary actually behaves as it should, but since NANs
442 are likely never passed to the libm you have a good chance to be lucky.
448 For questions, bugreports, development information and basically all other
449 concerns please send an email to collectd's mailinglist at
450 <collectd at verplant.org>.
452 For live discussion and more personal contact visit us in IRC, we're in
453 channel #collectd on freenode.
459 Florian octo Forster <octo at verplant.org>,
460 Sebastian tokkee Harl <sh at tokkee.org>,
461 and many contributors (see `AUTHORS').
463 Please send bugreports and patches to the mailinglist, see `Contact' above.