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 Batterycharge, -current and voltage of ACPI and PMU based laptop
34 CPU utilization: Time spent in the system, user, nice, idle, and related
38 CPU frequency (For laptops with speed step or a similar technology)
41 Mountpoint usage (Basically the values `df(1)' delivers)
44 Disk utilization: Sectors read/written, number of read/write actions,
45 average time an IO-operation took to complete.
48 DNS traffic: Query types, response codes, opcodes and traffic/octets
52 Email statistics: Count, traffic, spam scores and checks.
53 See collectd-email(5).
56 Amount of entropy available to the system.
59 Values gathered by a custom program or script.
63 Harddisk temperatures using hddtempd.
66 Interface traffic: Number of octets, packets and errors for each
70 Iptables' counters: Number of bytes that were matched by a certain
74 IPVS connection statistics (number of connections, octets and packets
75 for each service and destination).
76 See http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/software/index.html.
79 IRQ counters: Frequency in which certain interrupts occur.
82 System load average over the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes.
85 CPU, disk and network I/O statistics from virtual machines.
88 Parse XML data provided by libvirt.
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 Process counts: Number of running, sleeping, zombie, ... processes.
148 System sensors, accessed using lm_sensors: Voltages, temperatures and
152 RX and TX of serial interfaces. Linux only; needs root privileges.
155 Read values from SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) enabled
156 network devices such as switches, routers, thermometers, rack monitoring
157 servers, etc. See collectd-snmp(5).
160 Pages swapped out onto harddisk or whatever is called `swap' by the OS..
163 Follows (tails) logfiles, parses them by lines and submits matched
167 Bytes and operations read and written on tape devices. Solaris only.
170 Number of TCP connections to specific local and remote ports.
173 Users currently logged in.
176 System resources used by Linux VServers.
177 See <http://linux-vserver.org/>.
180 Link quality of wireless cards. Linux only.
183 Bitrate and frequency of music played with XMMS.
185 * Output can be written or send to various destinations by the following
189 Write to comma separated values (CSV) files. This needs lots of
190 diskspace but is extremely portable and can be analysed with almost
191 every program that can analyse anything. Even Microsoft's Excel..
194 Send the data to a remote host to save the data somehow. This is useful
195 for large setups where the data should be saved by a dedicated machine.
198 Of course the values are propagated to plugins written in Perl, too, so
199 you can easily do weird stuff with the plugins we didn't dare think of
200 ;) See collectd-perl(5).
203 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using librrd. See rrdtool(1).
204 This is likely the most popular destination for such values. Since
205 updates to RRD-files are somewhat expensive this plugin can cache
206 updates to the files and write a bunch of updates at once, which lessens
210 One can query the values from the unixsock plugin whenever they're
211 needed. Please read collectd-unixsock(5) for a description on how that's
214 * Logging is, as everything in collectd, provided by plugins. The following
215 plugins keep up informed about what's going on:
218 Writes logmessages to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
221 Log messages are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
222 See collectd-perl(5).
225 Logs to the standard UNIX logging mechanism, syslog.
227 * Notifications can be handled by the following plugins:
230 Execute a program or script to handle the notification.
231 See collectd-exec(5).
234 Writes the notification message to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
237 Send the notification to a remote host to handle it somehow.
240 Notifications are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
241 See collectd-perl(5).
243 * Miscellaneous plugins:
246 Sets the hostname to an unique identifier. This is meant for setups
247 where each client may migrate to another physical host, possibly going
248 through one or more name changes in the process.
250 * Performance: Since collectd is running as a daemon it doesn't spend much
251 time starting up again and again. With the exception of the exec plugin no
252 processes are forked. Caching in output plugins, such as the rrdtool and
253 network plugins, makes sure your resources are used efficiently. Also,
254 since collectd is programmed multithreaded it benefits from hyperthreading
255 and multicore processors and makes sure that the daemon isn't idle if only
256 one plugins waits for an IO-operation to complete.
258 * Once set up, hardly any maintenance is necessary. Setup is kept as easy
259 as possible and the default values should be okay for most users.
265 * collectd's configuration file can be found at `sysconfdir'/collectd.conf.
266 Run `collectd -h' for a list of builtin defaults. See `collectd.conf(5)'
267 for a list of options and a syntax description.
269 * When the `csv' or `rrdtool' plugins are loaded they'll write the values to
270 files. The usual place for these files is beneath `/var/lib/collectd'.
272 * When using some of the plugins, collectd needs to run as user root, since
273 only root can do certain things, such as craft ICMP packages needed to ping
274 other hosts. collectd should NOT be installed setuid root since it can be
275 used to overwrite valuable files!
277 * Sample scripts to generate graphs reside in `contrib/' in the source
278 package or somewhere near `/usr/share/doc/collectd' in most distributions.
279 Please be aware that those script are meant as a starting point for your
280 own experiments.. Some of them require the `RRDs' Perl module.
281 (`librrds-perl' on Debian) If you have written a more sophisticated
282 solution please share it with us.
284 * The RRAs of the automatically created RRD files depend on the `step'
285 and `heartbeat' settings given. If change these settings you may need to
286 re-create the files, losing all data. Please be aware of that when changing
287 the values and read the rrdtool(1) manpage thoroughly.
290 collectd and chkrootkit
291 -----------------------
293 If you are using the `dns' plugin chkrootkit(1) will report collectd as a
294 packet sniffer ("<iface>: PACKET SNIFFER(/usr/sbin/collectd[<pid>])"). The
295 plugin captures all UDP packets on port 53 to analyze the DNS traffic. In
296 this case, collectd is a legitimate sniffer and the report should be
297 considered to be a false positive. However, you might want to check that
298 this really is collectd and not some other, illegitimate sniffer.
304 To compile collectd from source you will need:
306 * Usual suspects: C compiler, linker, preprocessor, make, ...
308 * A POSIX-threads (pthread) implementation.
309 Since gathering some statistics is slow (network connections, slow devices,
310 etc) the collectd is parallelized. The POSIX threads interface is being
311 used and should be found in various implementations for hopefully all
315 If you want to use the `apache' and/or `nginx' plugins.
318 If present, the uuid plugin will check for UUID from HAL.
321 For querying iptables counters.
323 * libmysqlclient (optional)
324 Unsurprisingly used by the `mysql' plugin.
326 * libnetlink (optional)
327 Used, obviously, for the `netlink' plugin.
329 * libnetsnmp (optional)
330 For the `snmp' plugin.
332 * liboping (optional, if not found a version shipped with this distribution
334 Used by the `ping' plugin to send and receive ICMP packets.
337 Used to capture packets by the `dns' plugin.
340 Obviously used by the `perl' plugin. The library has to be compiled with
341 ithread support (introduced in Perl 5.6.0).
343 * librrd (optional; headers and library; rrdtool 1.0 and 1.2 both work fine)
344 If built without `librrd' the resulting binary will be `client only', i.e.
345 will send its values via multicast and not create any RRD files itself.
346 Alternatively you can chose to write CSV-files (Comma Separated Values)
349 * libsensors (optional)
350 To read from `lm_sensors', see the `sensors' plugin.
352 * libstatgrab may be used to collect statistics on systems other than Linux
353 and/or Solaris. Note that CPU- and disk-statistics, while being provided
354 by this library, are not supported in collectd right now..
355 <http://www.i-scream.org/libstatgrab/>
357 * libupsclient/nut (optional)
358 For the `nut' plugin which queries nut's `upsd'.
362 * librt, libsocket, libkstat, libdevinfo
363 Various standard Solaris libraries which provide system functions.
365 * CoreFoundation.framework and IOKit.framework
366 For compiling on Darwin in general and the `apple_sensors' plugin in
370 Collect statistics from virtual machines.
373 Configuring / Compiling / Installing
374 ------------------------------------
376 To configure, build and install collectd with the default settings, run
377 `./configure && make && make install'. For detailed, generic instructions
378 see INSTALL. For a complete list of configure options and their description,
379 run `./configure --help'.
381 By default, the configure script will check for all build dependencies and
382 disable all plugins whose requirements cannot be fulfilled (any other plugin
383 will be enabled). To enable a plugin, install missing dependencies (see
384 section `Prerequisites' above) and rerun `configure'. If you specify the
385 `--enable-<plugin>' configure option, you can force the plugin to be built.
386 This will most likely fail though unless you're working in a very unusual
387 setup and you really know what you're doing.
389 By default, collectd will be installed into `/opt/collectd'. You can adjust
390 this setting by specifying the `--prefix' configure option - see INSTALL for
391 details. If you pass DESTDIR=<path> to `make install', <path> will be
392 prefixed to all installation directories. This might be useful when creating
393 packages for collectd.
399 To compile correctly collectd needs to be able to initialize static
400 variables to NAN (Not A Number). Some C libraries, especially the GNU
401 libc, have a problem with that.
403 Luckily, with GCC it's possible to work around that problem: One can define
404 NAN as being (0.0 / 0.0) and `isnan' as `f != f'. However, to test this
405 ``implementation'' the configure script needs to compile and run a short
406 test program. Obviously running a test program when doing a cross-
407 compilation is, well, challenging.
409 If you run into this problem, you can use the `--with-nan-emulation'
410 configure option to force the use of this implementation. We can't promise
411 that the compiled binary actually behaves as it should, but since NANs
412 are likely never passed to the libm you have a good chance to be lucky.
418 For questions, bugreports, development information and basically all other
419 concerns please send an email to collectd's mailinglist at
420 <collectd at verplant.org>.
422 For live discussion and more personal contact visit us in IRC, we're in
423 channel #collectd on freenode.
429 Florian octo Forster <octo at verplant.org>,
430 Sebastian tokkee Harl <sh at tokkee.org>,
431 and many contributors (see `AUTHORS').
433 Please send bugreports and patches to the mailinglist, see `Contact' above.