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 Parse statistics from websites using regular expressions.
40 Name server and resolver statistics from the `statistics-channel'
41 interface of BIND 9.5, 9,6 and later.
44 Number of nf_conntrack entries.
47 Parse statistics from CouchDB JSON documents.
50 CPU utilization: Time spent in the system, user, nice, idle, and related
54 CPU frequency (For laptops with speed step or a similar technology)
57 Executes SQL statements on various databases and interprets the returned
61 Mountpoint usage (Basically the values `df(1)' delivers)
64 Disk utilization: Sectors read/written, number of read/write actions,
65 average time an IO-operation took to complete.
68 DNS traffic: Query types, response codes, opcodes and traffic/octets
72 Email statistics: Count, traffic, spam scores and checks.
73 See collectd-email(5).
76 Amount of entropy available to the system.
79 Values gathered by a custom program or script.
83 Count the number of files in directories.
86 Receive multicast traffic from Ganglia instances.
89 Harddisk temperatures using hddtempd.
92 Interface traffic: Number of octets, packets and errors for each
96 Iptables' counters: Number of bytes that were matched by a certain
100 IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) sensors information.
103 IPVS connection statistics (number of connections, octets and packets
104 for each service and destination).
105 See http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/software/index.html.
108 IRQ counters: Frequency in which certain interrupts occur.
111 Integrates a `Java Virtual Machine' (JVM) to execute plugins in Java
112 bytecode. See “Configuring with libjvm” below.
115 System load average over the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes.
118 CPU, disk and network I/O statistics from virtual machines.
121 Motherboard sensors: temperature, fanspeed and voltage information,
125 Statistics of the memcached distributed caching system.
126 <http://www.danga.com/memcached/>
129 Memory utilization: Memory occupied by running processes, page cache,
130 buffer cache and free.
133 Information provided by serial multimeters, such as the `Metex
137 MySQL server statistics: Commands issued, handlers triggered, thread
138 usage, query cache utilization and traffic/octets sent and received.
141 Very detailed Linux network interface and routing statistics. You can get
142 (detailed) information on interfaces, qdiscs, classes, and, if you can
143 make use of it, filters.
146 Receive values that were collected by other hosts. Large setups will
147 want to collect the data on one dedicated machine, and this is the
148 plugin of choice for that.
151 NFS Procedures: Which NFS command were called how often. Only NFSv2 and
155 Collects statistics from `nginx' (speak: engine X), a HTTP and mail
159 NTP daemon statistics: Local clock drift, offset to peers, etc.
162 Network UPS tools: UPS current, voltage, power, charge, utilisation,
163 temperature, etc. See upsd(8).
165 - onewire (EXPERIMENTAL!)
166 Read onewire sensors using the owcapu library of the owfs project.
167 Please read in collectd.conf(5) why this plugin is experimental.
170 RX and TX of each client in openvpn-status.log (status-version 2).
171 <http://openvpn.net/index.php/documentation/howto.html>
174 Query data from an Oracle database.
177 The perl plugin implements a Perl-interpreter into collectd. You can
178 write your own plugins in Perl and return arbitrary values using this
179 API. See collectd-perl(5).
182 Network latency: Time to reach the default gateway or another given
186 PostgreSQL database statistics: active server connections, transaction
187 numbers, block IO, table row manipulations.
190 PowerDNS name server statistics.
193 Process counts: Number of running, sleeping, zombie, ... processes.
196 Counts various aspects of network protocols such as IP, TCP, UDP, etc.
199 RRDtool caching daemon (RRDcacheD) statistics.
202 System sensors, accessed using lm_sensors: Voltages, temperatures and
206 RX and TX of serial interfaces. Linux only; needs root privileges.
209 Read values from SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) enabled
210 network devices such as switches, routers, thermometers, rack monitoring
211 servers, etc. See collectd-snmp(5).
214 Pages swapped out onto harddisk or whatever is called `swap' by the OS..
217 Follows (tails) logfiles, parses them by lines and submits matched
221 Bytes and operations read and written on tape devices. Solaris only.
224 Number of TCP connections to specific local and remote ports.
227 TeamSpeak2 server statistics.
230 Plugin to read values from `The Energy Detective' (TED).
233 Linux ACPI thermal zone information.
236 Users currently logged in.
239 Virtual memory statistics, e. g. the number of page-ins/-outs or the
240 number of pagefaults.
243 System resources used by Linux VServers.
244 See <http://linux-vserver.org/>.
247 Link quality of wireless cards. Linux only.
250 Bitrate and frequency of music played with XMMS.
252 * Output can be written or send to various destinations by the following
256 Write to comma separated values (CSV) files. This needs lots of
257 diskspace but is extremely portable and can be analysed with almost
258 every program that can analyse anything. Even Microsoft's Excel..
261 Send the data to a remote host to save the data somehow. This is useful
262 for large setups where the data should be saved by a dedicated machine.
265 Of course the values are propagated to plugins written in Perl, too, so
266 you can easily do weird stuff with the plugins we didn't dare think of
267 ;) See collectd-perl(5).
270 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using the RRDtool caching
271 daemon (RRDcacheD) - see rrdcached(1). That daemon provides a general
272 implementation of the caching done by the `rrdtool' plugin.
275 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using librrd. See rrdtool(1).
276 This is likely the most popular destination for such values. Since
277 updates to RRD-files are somewhat expensive this plugin can cache
278 updates to the files and write a bunch of updates at once, which lessens
282 One can query the values from the unixsock plugin whenever they're
283 needed. Please read collectd-unixsock(5) for a description on how that's
286 * Logging is, as everything in collectd, provided by plugins. The following
287 plugins keep up informed about what's going on:
290 Writes logmessages to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
293 Log messages are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
294 See collectd-perl(5).
297 Logs to the standard UNIX logging mechanism, syslog.
299 * Notifications can be handled by the following plugins:
302 Send a desktop notification to a notification daemon, as defined in
303 the Desktop Notification Specification. To actually display the
304 notifications, notification-daemon is required.
305 See http://www.galago-project.org/specs/notification/.
308 Send an E-mail with the notification message to the configured
312 Execute a program or script to handle the notification.
313 See collectd-exec(5).
316 Writes the notification message to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
319 Send the notification to a remote host to handle it somehow.
322 Notifications are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
323 See collectd-perl(5).
325 * Value processing can be controlled using the "filter chain" infrastructure
326 and "matches" and "targets". The following plugins are available:
329 Match values by their identifier based on regular expressions.
332 Match values with an invalid timestamp.
335 Select values by their data sources' values.
337 - target_notification
338 Create and dispatch a notification.
341 Replace parts of an identifier using regular expressions.
344 Set (overwrite) entire parts of an identifier.
346 * Miscellaneous plugins:
349 Sets the hostname to an unique identifier. This is meant for setups
350 where each client may migrate to another physical host, possibly going
351 through one or more name changes in the process.
353 * Performance: Since collectd is running as a daemon it doesn't spend much
354 time starting up again and again. With the exception of the exec plugin no
355 processes are forked. Caching in output plugins, such as the rrdtool and
356 network plugins, makes sure your resources are used efficiently. Also,
357 since collectd is programmed multithreaded it benefits from hyperthreading
358 and multicore processors and makes sure that the daemon isn't idle if only
359 one plugins waits for an IO-operation to complete.
361 * Once set up, hardly any maintenance is necessary. Setup is kept as easy
362 as possible and the default values should be okay for most users.
368 * collectd's configuration file can be found at `sysconfdir'/collectd.conf.
369 Run `collectd -h' for a list of builtin defaults. See `collectd.conf(5)'
370 for a list of options and a syntax description.
372 * When the `csv' or `rrdtool' plugins are loaded they'll write the values to
373 files. The usual place for these files is beneath `/var/lib/collectd'.
375 * When using some of the plugins, collectd needs to run as user root, since
376 only root can do certain things, such as craft ICMP packages needed to ping
377 other hosts. collectd should NOT be installed setuid root since it can be
378 used to overwrite valuable files!
380 * Sample scripts to generate graphs reside in `contrib/' in the source
381 package or somewhere near `/usr/share/doc/collectd' in most distributions.
382 Please be aware that those script are meant as a starting point for your
383 own experiments.. Some of them require the `RRDs' Perl module.
384 (`librrds-perl' on Debian) If you have written a more sophisticated
385 solution please share it with us.
387 * The RRAs of the automatically created RRD files depend on the `step'
388 and `heartbeat' settings given. If change these settings you may need to
389 re-create the files, losing all data. Please be aware of that when changing
390 the values and read the rrdtool(1) manpage thoroughly.
393 collectd and chkrootkit
394 -----------------------
396 If you are using the `dns' plugin chkrootkit(1) will report collectd as a
397 packet sniffer ("<iface>: PACKET SNIFFER(/usr/sbin/collectd[<pid>])"). The
398 plugin captures all UDP packets on port 53 to analyze the DNS traffic. In
399 this case, collectd is a legitimate sniffer and the report should be
400 considered to be a false positive. However, you might want to check that
401 this really is collectd and not some other, illegitimate sniffer.
407 To compile collectd from source you will need:
409 * Usual suspects: C compiler, linker, preprocessor, make, ...
411 * A POSIX-threads (pthread) implementation.
412 Since gathering some statistics is slow (network connections, slow devices,
413 etc) the collectd is parallelized. The POSIX threads interface is being
414 used and should be found in various implementations for hopefully all
417 * CoreFoundation.framework and IOKit.framework (optional)
418 For compiling on Darwin in general and the `apple_sensors' plugin in
420 <http://developer.apple.com/corefoundation/>
422 * libclntsh (optional)
423 Used by the `oracle' plugin.
426 If you want to use the `apache', `ascent', `curl' or `nginx' plugin.
427 <http://curl.haxx.se/>
430 Used by the `dbi' plugin to connect to various databases.
431 <http://libdbi.sourceforge.net/>
433 * libesmtp (optional)
434 For the `notify_email' plugin.
435 <http://www.stafford.uklinux.net/libesmtp/>
438 If present, the uuid plugin will check for UUID from HAL.
439 <http://hal.freedesktop.org/>
441 * libiptc (optional, if not found a version shipped with this distribution
442 can be used if the Linux kernel headers are available)
443 For querying iptables counters.
444 <http://netfilter.org/>
447 Library that encapsulates the `Java Virtual Machine' (JVM). This library is
448 used by the Java plugin to execute Java bytecode. See “Configuring with
451 * libmysqlclient (optional)
452 Unsurprisingly used by the `mysql' plugin.
453 <http://dev.mysql.com/>
455 * libnetlink (optional)
456 Used, obviously, for the `netlink' plugin.
457 <http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Net:Iproute2>
459 * libnetsnmp (optional)
460 For the `snmp' plugin.
461 <http://www.net-snmp.org/>
463 * libnotify (optional)
464 For the `notify_desktop' plugin.
465 <http://www.galago-project.org/>
467 * liboping (optional, if not found a version shipped with this distribution
469 Used by the `ping' plugin to send and receive ICMP packets.
470 <http://verplant.org/liboping/>
472 * libowcapi (optional)
473 Used by the `onewire' plugin to read values from onewire sensors (or the
475 <http://www.owfs.org/>
478 Used to capture packets by the `dns' plugin.
479 <http://www.tcpdump.org/>
482 Obviously used by the `perl' plugin. The library has to be compiled with
483 ithread support (introduced in Perl 5.6.0).
484 <http://www.perl.org/>
487 The PostgreSQL C client library used by the `postgresql' plugin.
488 <http://www.postgresql.org/>
491 Used by the `rrdtool' and `rrdcached' plugins. The latter requires RRDtool
492 client support which was added after version 1.3 of RRDtool. Versions 1.0,
493 1.2 and 1.3 are known to work with the `rrdtool' plugin.
494 <http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/>
496 * librt, libsocket, libkstat, libdevinfo (optional)
497 Various standard Solaris libraries which provide system functions.
498 <http://developers.sun.com/solaris/>
500 * libsensors (optional)
501 To read from `lm_sensors', see the `sensors' plugin.
502 <http://www.lm-sensors.org/>
504 * libstatgrab (optional)
505 Used by various plugins to collect statistics on systems other than Linux
507 <http://www.i-scream.org/libstatgrab/>
509 * libupsclient/nut (optional)
510 For the `nut' plugin which queries nut's `upsd'.
511 <http://networkupstools.org/>
514 Collect statistics from virtual machines.
515 <http://libvirt.org/>
518 Parse XML data. This is needed for the `ascent' and `libvirt' plugins.
519 <http://xmlsoft.org/>
522 <http://www.xmms.org/>
525 Parse JSON data. This is needed for the `couchdb' plugin.
526 <http://www.lloydforge.org/projects/yajl/>
528 Configuring / Compiling / Installing
529 ------------------------------------
531 To configure, build and install collectd with the default settings, run
532 `./configure && make && make install'. For detailed, generic instructions
533 see INSTALL. For a complete list of configure options and their description,
534 run `./configure --help'.
536 By default, the configure script will check for all build dependencies and
537 disable all plugins whose requirements cannot be fulfilled (any other plugin
538 will be enabled). To enable a plugin, install missing dependencies (see
539 section `Prerequisites' above) and rerun `configure'. If you specify the
540 `--enable-<plugin>' configure option, the script will fail if the depen-
541 dencies for the specified plugin are not met. If you specify the
542 `--disable-<plugin>' configure option, the plugin will not be built. Both
543 options are meant for package maintainers and should not be used in everyday
546 By default, collectd will be installed into `/opt/collectd'. You can adjust
547 this setting by specifying the `--prefix' configure option - see INSTALL for
548 details. If you pass DESTDIR=<path> to `make install', <path> will be
549 prefixed to all installation directories. This might be useful when creating
550 packages for collectd.
552 Configuring with libjvm
553 -----------------------
555 To determine the location of the required files of a Java installation is not
556 an easy task, because the locations vary with your kernel (Linux, SunOS, …)
557 and with your architecture (x86, SPARC, …) and there is no ‘java-config’
558 script we could use. Configuration of the JVM library is therefore a bit
561 The easiest way to use the `--with-java=$JAVA_HOME' option, where
562 `$JAVA_HOME' is usually something like:
563 /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0.14
565 The configure script will then use find(1) to look for the following files:
571 If found, appropriate CPP-flags and LD-flags are set and the following
572 library checks succeed.
574 If this doesn't work for you, you have the possibility to specify CPP-flags,
575 C-flags and LD-flags for the ‘Java’ plugin by hand, using the following three
576 (environment) variables:
582 For example (shortened for demonstration purposes):
584 ./configure JAVA_CPPFLAGS="-I$JAVA_HOME/include -I$JAVA_HOME/include/linux"
586 Adding "-ljvm" to the JAVA_LDFLAGS is done automatically, you don't have to
592 To compile correctly collectd needs to be able to initialize static
593 variables to NAN (Not A Number). Some C libraries, especially the GNU
594 libc, have a problem with that.
596 Luckily, with GCC it's possible to work around that problem: One can define
597 NAN as being (0.0 / 0.0) and `isnan' as `f != f'. However, to test this
598 ``implementation'' the configure script needs to compile and run a short
599 test program. Obviously running a test program when doing a cross-
600 compilation is, well, challenging.
602 If you run into this problem, you can use the `--with-nan-emulation'
603 configure option to force the use of this implementation. We can't promise
604 that the compiled binary actually behaves as it should, but since NANs
605 are likely never passed to the libm you have a good chance to be lucky.
607 Likewise, collectd needs to know the layout of doubles in memory, in order
608 to craft uniform network packets over different architectures. For this, it
609 needs to know how to convert doubles into the memory layout used by x86. The
610 configure script tries to figure this out by compiling and running a few
611 small test programs. This is of course not possible when cross-compiling.
612 You can use the `--with-fp-layout' option to tell the configure script which
613 conversion method to assume. Valid arguments are:
615 * `nothing' (12345678 -> 12345678)
616 * `endianflip' (12345678 -> 87654321)
617 * `intswap' (12345678 -> 56781234)
623 For questions, bug reports, development information and basically all other
624 concerns please send an email to collectd's mailing list at
625 <collectd at verplant.org>.
627 For live discussion and more personal contact visit us in IRC, we're in
628 channel #collectd on freenode.
634 Florian octo Forster <octo at verplant.org>,
635 Sebastian tokkee Harl <sh at tokkee.org>,
636 and many contributors (see `AUTHORS').
638 Please send bug reports and patches to the mailing list, see `Contact'