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 Count the number of files in directories.
69 Harddisk temperatures using hddtempd.
72 Interface traffic: Number of octets, packets and errors for each
76 Iptables' counters: Number of bytes that were matched by a certain
80 IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) sensors information.
83 IPVS connection statistics (number of connections, octets and packets
84 for each service and destination).
85 See http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/software/index.html.
88 IRQ counters: Frequency in which certain interrupts occur.
91 System load average over the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes.
94 CPU, disk and network I/O statistics from virtual machines.
97 Motherboard sensors: temperature, fanspeed and voltage information,
101 Statistics of the memcached distributed caching system.
102 <http://www.danga.com/memcached/>
105 Memory utilization: Memory occupied by running processes, page cache,
106 buffer cache and free.
109 Information provided by serial multimeters, such as the `Metex
113 MySQL server statistics: Commands issued, handlers triggered, thread
114 usage, query cache utilization and traffic/octets sent and received.
117 Very detailed Linux network interface and routing statistics. You can get
118 (detailed) information on interfaces, qdiscs, classes, and, if you can
119 make use of it, filters.
122 Receive values that were collected by other hosts. Large setups will
123 want to collect the data on one dedicated machine, and this is the
124 plugin of choice for that.
127 NFS Procedures: Which NFS command were called how often. Only NFSv2 and
131 Collects statistics from `nginx' (speak: engine X), a HTTP and mail
135 NTP daemon statistics: Local clock drift, offset to peers, etc.
138 Network UPS tools: UPS current, voltage, power, charge, utilisation,
139 temperature, etc. See upsd(8).
141 - onewire (EXPERIMENTAL!)
142 Read onewire sensors using the owcapu library of the owfs project.
143 Please read in collectd.conf(5) why this plugin is experimental.
146 The perl plugin implements a Perl-interpreter into collectd. You can
147 write your own plugins in Perl and return arbitrary values using this
148 API. See collectd-perl(5).
151 Network latency: Time to reach the default gateway or another given
155 PostgreSQL database statistics: active server connections, transaction
156 numbers, block IO, table row manipulations.
159 PowerDNS name server statistics.
162 Process counts: Number of running, sleeping, zombie, ... processes.
165 RRDtool caching daemon (RRDcacheD) statistics.
168 System sensors, accessed using lm_sensors: Voltages, temperatures and
172 RX and TX of serial interfaces. Linux only; needs root privileges.
175 Read values from SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) enabled
176 network devices such as switches, routers, thermometers, rack monitoring
177 servers, etc. See collectd-snmp(5).
180 Pages swapped out onto harddisk or whatever is called `swap' by the OS..
183 Follows (tails) logfiles, parses them by lines and submits matched
187 Bytes and operations read and written on tape devices. Solaris only.
190 Number of TCP connections to specific local and remote ports.
193 TeamSpeak2 server statistics.
196 Linux ACPI thermal zone information.
199 Users currently logged in.
202 Virtual memory statistics, e. g. the number of page-ins/-outs or the
203 number of pagefaults.
206 System resources used by Linux VServers.
207 See <http://linux-vserver.org/>.
210 Link quality of wireless cards. Linux only.
213 Bitrate and frequency of music played with XMMS.
215 * Output can be written or send to various destinations by the following
219 Write to comma separated values (CSV) files. This needs lots of
220 diskspace but is extremely portable and can be analysed with almost
221 every program that can analyse anything. Even Microsoft's Excel..
224 Send the data to a remote host to save the data somehow. This is useful
225 for large setups where the data should be saved by a dedicated machine.
228 Of course the values are propagated to plugins written in Perl, too, so
229 you can easily do weird stuff with the plugins we didn't dare think of
230 ;) See collectd-perl(5).
233 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using the RRDtool caching
234 daemon (RRDcacheD) - see rrdcached(1). That daemon provides a general
235 implementation of the caching done by the `rrdtool' plugin.
238 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using librrd. See rrdtool(1).
239 This is likely the most popular destination for such values. Since
240 updates to RRD-files are somewhat expensive this plugin can cache
241 updates to the files and write a bunch of updates at once, which lessens
245 One can query the values from the unixsock plugin whenever they're
246 needed. Please read collectd-unixsock(5) for a description on how that's
249 * Logging is, as everything in collectd, provided by plugins. The following
250 plugins keep up informed about what's going on:
253 Writes logmessages to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
256 Log messages are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
257 See collectd-perl(5).
260 Logs to the standard UNIX logging mechanism, syslog.
262 * Notifications can be handled by the following plugins:
265 Send a desktop notification to a notification daemon, as defined in
266 the Desktop Notification Specification. To actually display the
267 notifications, notification-daemon is required.
268 See http://www.galago-project.org/specs/notification/.
271 Send an E-mail with the notification message to the configured
275 Execute a program or script to handle the notification.
276 See collectd-exec(5).
279 Writes the notification message to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
282 Send the notification to a remote host to handle it somehow.
285 Notifications are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
286 See collectd-perl(5).
288 * Miscellaneous plugins:
291 Sets the hostname to an unique identifier. This is meant for setups
292 where each client may migrate to another physical host, possibly going
293 through one or more name changes in the process.
295 * Performance: Since collectd is running as a daemon it doesn't spend much
296 time starting up again and again. With the exception of the exec plugin no
297 processes are forked. Caching in output plugins, such as the rrdtool and
298 network plugins, makes sure your resources are used efficiently. Also,
299 since collectd is programmed multithreaded it benefits from hyperthreading
300 and multicore processors and makes sure that the daemon isn't idle if only
301 one plugins waits for an IO-operation to complete.
303 * Once set up, hardly any maintenance is necessary. Setup is kept as easy
304 as possible and the default values should be okay for most users.
310 * collectd's configuration file can be found at `sysconfdir'/collectd.conf.
311 Run `collectd -h' for a list of builtin defaults. See `collectd.conf(5)'
312 for a list of options and a syntax description.
314 * When the `csv' or `rrdtool' plugins are loaded they'll write the values to
315 files. The usual place for these files is beneath `/var/lib/collectd'.
317 * When using some of the plugins, collectd needs to run as user root, since
318 only root can do certain things, such as craft ICMP packages needed to ping
319 other hosts. collectd should NOT be installed setuid root since it can be
320 used to overwrite valuable files!
322 * Sample scripts to generate graphs reside in `contrib/' in the source
323 package or somewhere near `/usr/share/doc/collectd' in most distributions.
324 Please be aware that those script are meant as a starting point for your
325 own experiments.. Some of them require the `RRDs' Perl module.
326 (`librrds-perl' on Debian) If you have written a more sophisticated
327 solution please share it with us.
329 * The RRAs of the automatically created RRD files depend on the `step'
330 and `heartbeat' settings given. If change these settings you may need to
331 re-create the files, losing all data. Please be aware of that when changing
332 the values and read the rrdtool(1) manpage thoroughly.
335 collectd and chkrootkit
336 -----------------------
338 If you are using the `dns' plugin chkrootkit(1) will report collectd as a
339 packet sniffer ("<iface>: PACKET SNIFFER(/usr/sbin/collectd[<pid>])"). The
340 plugin captures all UDP packets on port 53 to analyze the DNS traffic. In
341 this case, collectd is a legitimate sniffer and the report should be
342 considered to be a false positive. However, you might want to check that
343 this really is collectd and not some other, illegitimate sniffer.
349 To compile collectd from source you will need:
351 * Usual suspects: C compiler, linker, preprocessor, make, ...
353 * A POSIX-threads (pthread) implementation.
354 Since gathering some statistics is slow (network connections, slow devices,
355 etc) the collectd is parallelized. The POSIX threads interface is being
356 used and should be found in various implementations for hopefully all
359 * CoreFoundation.framework and IOKit.framework (optional)
360 For compiling on Darwin in general and the `apple_sensors' plugin in
364 If you want to use the `apache', `ascent', or `nginx' plugin.
366 * libesmtp (optional)
367 For the `notify_email' plugin.
370 If present, the uuid plugin will check for UUID from HAL.
372 * libiptc (optional, if not found a version shipped with this distribution
373 can be used if the Linux kernel headers are available)
374 For querying iptables counters.
376 * libmysqlclient (optional)
377 Unsurprisingly used by the `mysql' plugin.
379 * libnetlink (optional)
380 Used, obviously, for the `netlink' plugin.
382 * libnetsnmp (optional)
383 For the `snmp' plugin.
385 * libnotify (optional)
386 For the `notify_desktop' plugin.
388 * liboping (optional, if not found a version shipped with this distribution
390 Used by the `ping' plugin to send and receive ICMP packets.
392 * libowcapi (optional)
393 Used by the `onewire' plugin to read values from onewire sensors (or the
397 Used to capture packets by the `dns' plugin.
400 Obviously used by the `perl' plugin. The library has to be compiled with
401 ithread support (introduced in Perl 5.6.0).
404 The PostgreSQL C client library used by the `postgresql' plugin.
407 Used by the `rrdtool' and `rrdcached' plugins. The latter requires RRDtool
408 client support which was added after version 1.3 of RRDtool. Versions 1.0,
409 1.2 and 1.3 are known to work with the `rrdtool' plugin.
411 * librt, libsocket, libkstat, libdevinfo (optional)
412 Various standard Solaris libraries which provide system functions.
414 * libsensors (optional)
415 To read from `lm_sensors', see the `sensors' plugin.
417 * libstatgrab (optional)
418 Used by various plugins to collect statistics on systems other than Linux
420 <http://www.i-scream.org/libstatgrab/>
422 * libupsclient/nut (optional)
423 For the `nut' plugin which queries nut's `upsd'.
426 Collect statistics from virtual machines.
429 Parse XML data. This is needed for the `ascent' and `libvirt' plugins.
434 Configuring / Compiling / Installing
435 ------------------------------------
437 To configure, build and install collectd with the default settings, run
438 `./configure && make && make install'. For detailed, generic instructions
439 see INSTALL. For a complete list of configure options and their description,
440 run `./configure --help'.
442 By default, the configure script will check for all build dependencies and
443 disable all plugins whose requirements cannot be fulfilled (any other plugin
444 will be enabled). To enable a plugin, install missing dependencies (see
445 section `Prerequisites' above) and rerun `configure'. If you specify the
446 `--enable-<plugin>' configure option, you can force the plugin to be built.
447 This will most likely fail though unless you're working in a very unusual
448 setup and you really know what you're doing.
450 By default, collectd will be installed into `/opt/collectd'. You can adjust
451 this setting by specifying the `--prefix' configure option - see INSTALL for
452 details. If you pass DESTDIR=<path> to `make install', <path> will be
453 prefixed to all installation directories. This might be useful when creating
454 packages for collectd.
460 To compile correctly collectd needs to be able to initialize static
461 variables to NAN (Not A Number). Some C libraries, especially the GNU
462 libc, have a problem with that.
464 Luckily, with GCC it's possible to work around that problem: One can define
465 NAN as being (0.0 / 0.0) and `isnan' as `f != f'. However, to test this
466 ``implementation'' the configure script needs to compile and run a short
467 test program. Obviously running a test program when doing a cross-
468 compilation is, well, challenging.
470 If you run into this problem, you can use the `--with-nan-emulation'
471 configure option to force the use of this implementation. We can't promise
472 that the compiled binary actually behaves as it should, but since NANs
473 are likely never passed to the libm you have a good chance to be lucky.
479 For questions, bugreports, development information and basically all other
480 concerns please send an email to collectd's mailinglist at
481 <collectd at verplant.org>.
483 For live discussion and more personal contact visit us in IRC, we're in
484 channel #collectd on freenode.
490 Florian octo Forster <octo at verplant.org>,
491 Sebastian tokkee Harl <sh at tokkee.org>,
492 and many contributors (see `AUTHORS').
494 Please send bugreports and patches to the mailinglist, see `Contact' above.