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 Executes SQL statements on various databases and interprets the returned
65 Mountpoint usage (Basically the values `df(1)' delivers)
68 Disk utilization: Sectors read/written, number of read/write actions,
69 average time an IO-operation took to complete.
72 DNS traffic: Query types, response codes, opcodes and traffic/octets
76 Email statistics: Count, traffic, spam scores and checks.
77 See collectd-email(5).
80 Amount of entropy available to the system.
83 Values gathered by a custom program or script.
87 Count the number of files in directories.
90 Linux file-system based caching framework statistics.
93 Receive multicast traffic from Ganglia instances.
96 Harddisk temperatures using hddtempd.
99 Interface traffic: Number of octets, packets and errors for each
103 Iptables' counters: Number of bytes that were matched by a certain
107 IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) sensors information.
110 IPVS connection statistics (number of connections, octets and packets
111 for each service and destination).
112 See http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/software/index.html.
115 IRQ counters: Frequency in which certain interrupts occur.
118 Integrates a `Java Virtual Machine' (JVM) to execute plugins in Java
119 bytecode. See “Configuring with libjvm” below.
122 System load average over the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes.
125 CPU, disk and network I/O statistics from virtual machines.
128 Queries very detailed usage statistics from wireless LAN adapters and
129 interfaces that use the Atheros chipset and the MadWifi driver.
132 Motherboard sensors: temperature, fanspeed and voltage information,
136 Query and parse data from a memcache daemon (memcached).
139 Statistics of the memcached distributed caching system.
140 <http://www.danga.com/memcached/>
143 Memory utilization: Memory occupied by running processes, page cache,
144 buffer cache and free.
147 Information provided by serial multimeters, such as the `Metex
151 MySQL server statistics: Commands issued, handlers triggered, thread
152 usage, query cache utilization and traffic/octets sent and received.
155 Plugin to query performance values from a NetApp storage system using the
156 “Manage ONTAP” SDK provided by NetApp.
159 Very detailed Linux network interface and routing statistics. You can get
160 (detailed) information on interfaces, qdiscs, classes, and, if you can
161 make use of it, filters.
164 Receive values that were collected by other hosts. Large setups will
165 want to collect the data on one dedicated machine, and this is the
166 plugin of choice for that.
169 NFS Procedures: Which NFS command were called how often. Only NFSv2 and
173 Collects statistics from `nginx' (speak: engine X), a HTTP and mail
177 NTP daemon statistics: Local clock drift, offset to peers, etc.
180 Network UPS tools: UPS current, voltage, power, charge, utilisation,
181 temperature, etc. See upsd(8).
184 Queries routing information from the “Optimized Link State Routing”
187 - onewire (EXPERIMENTAL!)
188 Read onewire sensors using the owcapu library of the owfs project.
189 Please read in collectd.conf(5) why this plugin is experimental.
192 RX and TX of each client in openvpn-status.log (status-version 2).
193 <http://openvpn.net/index.php/documentation/howto.html>
196 Query data from an Oracle database.
199 The perl plugin implements a Perl-interpreter into collectd. You can
200 write your own plugins in Perl and return arbitrary values using this
201 API. See collectd-perl(5).
204 Network latency: Time to reach the default gateway or another given
208 PostgreSQL database statistics: active server connections, transaction
209 numbers, block IO, table row manipulations.
212 PowerDNS name server statistics.
215 Process counts: Number of running, sleeping, zombie, ... processes.
218 Counts various aspects of network protocols such as IP, TCP, UDP, etc.
221 RRDtool caching daemon (RRDcacheD) statistics.
224 System sensors, accessed using lm_sensors: Voltages, temperatures and
228 RX and TX of serial interfaces. Linux only; needs root privileges.
231 Read values from SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) enabled
232 network devices such as switches, routers, thermometers, rack monitoring
233 servers, etc. See collectd-snmp(5).
236 Pages swapped out onto harddisk or whatever is called `swap' by the OS..
239 Parse table-like structured files.
242 Follows (tails) logfiles, parses them by lines and submits matched
246 Bytes and operations read and written on tape devices. Solaris only.
249 Number of TCP connections to specific local and remote ports.
252 TeamSpeak2 server statistics.
255 Plugin to read values from `The Energy Detective' (TED).
258 Linux ACPI thermal zone information.
261 Reads the number of records and file size from a running Tokyo Tyrant
265 System uptime statistics.
268 Users currently logged in.
271 Virtual memory statistics, e. g. the number of page-ins/-outs or the
272 number of pagefaults.
275 System resources used by Linux VServers.
276 See <http://linux-vserver.org/>.
279 Link quality of wireless cards. Linux only.
282 Bitrate and frequency of music played with XMMS.
285 Statistics for ZFS' “Adaptive Replacement Cache” (ARC).
287 * Output can be written or send to various destinations by the following
291 Write to comma separated values (CSV) files. This needs lots of
292 diskspace but is extremely portable and can be analysed with almost
293 every program that can analyse anything. Even Microsoft's Excel..
296 Send the data to a remote host to save the data somehow. This is useful
297 for large setups where the data should be saved by a dedicated machine.
300 Of course the values are propagated to plugins written in Perl, too, so
301 you can easily do weird stuff with the plugins we didn't dare think of
302 ;) See collectd-perl(5).
305 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using the RRDtool caching
306 daemon (RRDcacheD) - see rrdcached(1). That daemon provides a general
307 implementation of the caching done by the `rrdtool' plugin.
310 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using librrd. See rrdtool(1).
311 This is likely the most popular destination for such values. Since
312 updates to RRD-files are somewhat expensive this plugin can cache
313 updates to the files and write a bunch of updates at once, which lessens
317 One can query the values from the unixsock plugin whenever they're
318 needed. Please read collectd-unixsock(5) for a description on how that's
322 Sends the values collected by collectd to a web-server using HTTP POST
323 requests. The transmitted data is either in a form understood by the
324 Exec plugin or formatted in JSON.
326 * Logging is, as everything in collectd, provided by plugins. The following
327 plugins keep up informed about what's going on:
330 Writes logmessages to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
333 Log messages are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
334 See collectd-perl(5).
337 Logs to the standard UNIX logging mechanism, syslog.
339 * Notifications can be handled by the following plugins:
342 Send a desktop notification to a notification daemon, as defined in
343 the Desktop Notification Specification. To actually display the
344 notifications, notification-daemon is required.
345 See http://www.galago-project.org/specs/notification/.
348 Send an E-mail with the notification message to the configured
352 Execute a program or script to handle the notification.
353 See collectd-exec(5).
356 Writes the notification message to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
359 Send the notification to a remote host to handle it somehow.
362 Notifications are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
363 See collectd-perl(5).
365 * Value processing can be controlled using the "filter chain" infrastructure
366 and "matches" and "targets". The following plugins are available:
368 - match_empty_counter
369 Match counter values which are currently zero.
372 Match values by their identifier based on regular expressions.
375 Match values with an invalid timestamp.
378 Select values by their data sources' values.
380 - target_notification
381 Create and dispatch a notification.
384 Replace parts of an identifier using regular expressions.
387 Set (overwrite) entire parts of an identifier.
389 * Miscellaneous plugins:
392 Sets the hostname to an unique identifier. This is meant for setups
393 where each client may migrate to another physical host, possibly going
394 through one or more name changes in the process.
396 * Performance: Since collectd is running as a daemon it doesn't spend much
397 time starting up again and again. With the exception of the exec plugin no
398 processes are forked. Caching in output plugins, such as the rrdtool and
399 network plugins, makes sure your resources are used efficiently. Also,
400 since collectd is programmed multithreaded it benefits from hyperthreading
401 and multicore processors and makes sure that the daemon isn't idle if only
402 one plugins waits for an IO-operation to complete.
404 * Once set up, hardly any maintenance is necessary. Setup is kept as easy
405 as possible and the default values should be okay for most users.
411 * collectd's configuration file can be found at `sysconfdir'/collectd.conf.
412 Run `collectd -h' for a list of builtin defaults. See `collectd.conf(5)'
413 for a list of options and a syntax description.
415 * When the `csv' or `rrdtool' plugins are loaded they'll write the values to
416 files. The usual place for these files is beneath `/var/lib/collectd'.
418 * When using some of the plugins, collectd needs to run as user root, since
419 only root can do certain things, such as craft ICMP packages needed to ping
420 other hosts. collectd should NOT be installed setuid root since it can be
421 used to overwrite valuable files!
423 * Sample scripts to generate graphs reside in `contrib/' in the source
424 package or somewhere near `/usr/share/doc/collectd' in most distributions.
425 Please be aware that those script are meant as a starting point for your
426 own experiments.. Some of them require the `RRDs' Perl module.
427 (`librrds-perl' on Debian) If you have written a more sophisticated
428 solution please share it with us.
430 * The RRAs of the automatically created RRD files depend on the `step'
431 and `heartbeat' settings given. If change these settings you may need to
432 re-create the files, losing all data. Please be aware of that when changing
433 the values and read the rrdtool(1) manpage thoroughly.
436 collectd and chkrootkit
437 -----------------------
439 If you are using the `dns' plugin chkrootkit(1) will report collectd as a
440 packet sniffer ("<iface>: PACKET SNIFFER(/usr/sbin/collectd[<pid>])"). The
441 plugin captures all UDP packets on port 53 to analyze the DNS traffic. In
442 this case, collectd is a legitimate sniffer and the report should be
443 considered to be a false positive. However, you might want to check that
444 this really is collectd and not some other, illegitimate sniffer.
450 To compile collectd from source you will need:
452 * Usual suspects: C compiler, linker, preprocessor, make, ...
454 * A POSIX-threads (pthread) implementation.
455 Since gathering some statistics is slow (network connections, slow devices,
456 etc) the collectd is parallelized. The POSIX threads interface is being
457 used and should be found in various implementations for hopefully all
460 * CoreFoundation.framework and IOKit.framework (optional)
461 For compiling on Darwin in general and the `apple_sensors' plugin in
463 <http://developer.apple.com/corefoundation/>
465 * libclntsh (optional)
466 Used by the `oracle' plugin.
469 If you want to use the `apache', `ascent', `curl', `nginx', or `write_http'
471 <http://curl.haxx.se/>
474 Used by the `dbi' plugin to connect to various databases.
475 <http://libdbi.sourceforge.net/>
477 * libesmtp (optional)
478 For the `notify_email' plugin.
479 <http://www.stafford.uklinux.net/libesmtp/>
481 * libganglia (optional)
482 Used by the `gmond' plugin to process data received from Ganglia.
483 <http://ganglia.info/>
485 * libgcrypt (optional)
486 Used by the `network' plugin for encryption and authentication.
487 <http://www.gnupg.org/>
490 If present, the uuid plugin will check for UUID from HAL.
491 <http://hal.freedesktop.org/>
494 For querying iptables counters.
495 <http://netfilter.org/>
497 If not found on the system, a version shipped with this distribution can
498 be used. It requires some Linux headers in /usr/include/linux. You can
499 force the build system to use the shipped version by specifying
500 --with-libiptc=shipped
501 when running the configure script.
504 Library that encapsulates the `Java Virtual Machine' (JVM). This library is
505 used by the Java plugin to execute Java bytecode. See “Configuring with
507 <http://openjdk.java.net/> (and others)
509 * libmemcached (optional)
510 Used by the `memcachec' plugin to connect to a memcache daemon.
511 <http://tangent.org/552/libmemcached.html>
513 * libmysqlclient (optional)
514 Unsurprisingly used by the `mysql' plugin.
515 <http://dev.mysql.com/>
517 * libnatapp (optional)
518 Required for the “netapp” plugin.
519 This library is part of the “Manage ONTAP SDK” published by NetApp.
521 * libnetlink (optional)
522 Used, obviously, for the `netlink' plugin.
523 <http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Net:Iproute2>
525 * libnetsnmp (optional)
526 For the `snmp' plugin.
527 <http://www.net-snmp.org/>
529 * libnotify (optional)
530 For the `notify_desktop' plugin.
531 <http://www.galago-project.org/>
533 * liboping (optional)
534 Used by the `ping' plugin to send and receive ICMP packets.
535 <http://verplant.org/liboping/>
537 * libowcapi (optional)
538 Used by the `onewire' plugin to read values from onewire sensors (or the
540 <http://www.owfs.org/>
543 Used to capture packets by the `dns' plugin.
544 <http://www.tcpdump.org/>
547 Obviously used by the `perl' plugin. The library has to be compiled with
548 ithread support (introduced in Perl 5.6.0).
549 <http://www.perl.org/>
552 The PostgreSQL C client library used by the `postgresql' plugin.
553 <http://www.postgresql.org/>
556 Used by the `rrdtool' and `rrdcached' plugins. The latter requires RRDtool
557 client support which was added after version 1.3 of RRDtool. Versions 1.0,
558 1.2 and 1.3 are known to work with the `rrdtool' plugin.
559 <http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/>
561 * librt, libsocket, libkstat, libdevinfo (optional)
562 Various standard Solaris libraries which provide system functions.
563 <http://developers.sun.com/solaris/>
565 * libsensors (optional)
566 To read from `lm_sensors', see the `sensors' plugin.
567 <http://www.lm-sensors.org/>
569 * libstatgrab (optional)
570 Used by various plugins to collect statistics on systems other than Linux
572 <http://www.i-scream.org/libstatgrab/>
574 * libtokyotyrant (optional)
575 Used by the tokyotyrant plugin.
576 <http://1978th.net/tokyotyrant/>
578 * libupsclient/nut (optional)
579 For the `nut' plugin which queries nut's `upsd'.
580 <http://networkupstools.org/>
583 Collect statistics from virtual machines.
584 <http://libvirt.org/>
587 Parse XML data. This is needed for the `ascent' and `libvirt' plugins.
588 <http://xmlsoft.org/>
591 <http://www.xmms.org/>
594 Parse JSON data. This is needed for the `curl_json' plugin.
595 <http://github.com/lloyd/yajl>
597 Configuring / Compiling / Installing
598 ------------------------------------
600 To configure, build and install collectd with the default settings, run
601 `./configure && make && make install'. For detailed, generic instructions
602 see INSTALL. For a complete list of configure options and their description,
603 run `./configure --help'.
605 By default, the configure script will check for all build dependencies and
606 disable all plugins whose requirements cannot be fulfilled (any other plugin
607 will be enabled). To enable a plugin, install missing dependencies (see
608 section `Prerequisites' above) and rerun `configure'. If you specify the
609 `--enable-<plugin>' configure option, the script will fail if the depen-
610 dencies for the specified plugin are not met. In that case you can force the
611 plugin to be built using the `--enable-<plugin>=force' configure option.
612 This will most likely fail though unless you're working in a very unusual
613 setup and you really know what you're doing. If you specify the
614 `--disable-<plugin>' configure option, the plugin will not be built. If you
615 specify the `--enable-all-plugins' or `--disable-all-plugins' configure
616 options, all plugins will be enabled or disabled respectively by default.
617 Explicitly enabling or disabling a plugin overwrites the default for the
618 specified plugin. These options are meant for package maintainers and should
619 not be used in everyday situations.
621 By default, collectd will be installed into `/opt/collectd'. You can adjust
622 this setting by specifying the `--prefix' configure option - see INSTALL for
623 details. If you pass DESTDIR=<path> to `make install', <path> will be
624 prefixed to all installation directories. This might be useful when creating
625 packages for collectd.
627 Configuring with libjvm
628 -----------------------
630 To determine the location of the required files of a Java installation is not
631 an easy task, because the locations vary with your kernel (Linux, SunOS, …)
632 and with your architecture (x86, SPARC, …) and there is no ‘java-config’
633 script we could use. Configuration of the JVM library is therefore a bit
636 The easiest way to use the `--with-java=$JAVA_HOME' option, where
637 `$JAVA_HOME' is usually something like:
638 /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0.14
640 The configure script will then use find(1) to look for the following files:
646 If found, appropriate CPP-flags and LD-flags are set and the following
647 library checks succeed.
649 If this doesn't work for you, you have the possibility to specify CPP-flags,
650 C-flags and LD-flags for the ‘Java’ plugin by hand, using the following three
651 (environment) variables:
657 For example (shortened for demonstration purposes):
659 ./configure JAVA_CPPFLAGS="-I$JAVA_HOME/include -I$JAVA_HOME/include/linux"
661 Adding "-ljvm" to the JAVA_LDFLAGS is done automatically, you don't have to
667 To compile correctly collectd needs to be able to initialize static
668 variables to NAN (Not A Number). Some C libraries, especially the GNU
669 libc, have a problem with that.
671 Luckily, with GCC it's possible to work around that problem: One can define
672 NAN as being (0.0 / 0.0) and `isnan' as `f != f'. However, to test this
673 ``implementation'' the configure script needs to compile and run a short
674 test program. Obviously running a test program when doing a cross-
675 compilation is, well, challenging.
677 If you run into this problem, you can use the `--with-nan-emulation'
678 configure option to force the use of this implementation. We can't promise
679 that the compiled binary actually behaves as it should, but since NANs
680 are likely never passed to the libm you have a good chance to be lucky.
682 Likewise, collectd needs to know the layout of doubles in memory, in order
683 to craft uniform network packets over different architectures. For this, it
684 needs to know how to convert doubles into the memory layout used by x86. The
685 configure script tries to figure this out by compiling and running a few
686 small test programs. This is of course not possible when cross-compiling.
687 You can use the `--with-fp-layout' option to tell the configure script which
688 conversion method to assume. Valid arguments are:
690 * `nothing' (12345678 -> 12345678)
691 * `endianflip' (12345678 -> 87654321)
692 * `intswap' (12345678 -> 56781234)
698 For questions, bug reports, development information and basically all other
699 concerns please send an email to collectd's mailing list at
700 <collectd at verplant.org>.
702 For live discussion and more personal contact visit us in IRC, we're in
703 channel #collectd on freenode.
709 Florian octo Forster <octo at verplant.org>,
710 Sebastian tokkee Harl <sh at tokkee.org>,
711 and many contributors (see `AUTHORS').
713 Please send bug reports and patches to the mailing list, see `Contact'