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 Motherboard sensors: temperature, fanspeed and voltage information,
92 Statistics of the memcached distributed caching system.
93 <http://www.danga.com/memcached/>
96 Memory utilization: Memory occupied by running processes, page cache,
97 buffer cache and free.
100 Information provided by serial multimeters, such as the `Metex
104 MySQL server statistics: Commands issued, handlers triggered, thread
105 usage, query cache utilization and traffic/octets sent and received.
108 Very detailed Linux network interface and routing statistics. You can get
109 (detailed) information on interfaces, qdiscs, classes, and, if you can
110 make use of it, filters.
113 Receive values that were collected by other hosts. Large setups will
114 want to collect the data on one dedicated machine, and this is the
115 plugin of choice for that.
118 NFS Procedures: Which NFS command were called how often. Only NFSv2 and
122 Collects statistics from `nginx' (speak: engine X), a HTTP and mail
126 NTP daemon statistics: Local clock drift, offset to peers, etc.
129 Network UPS tools: UPS current, voltage, power, charge, utilisation,
130 temperature, etc. See upsd(8).
133 The perl plugin implements a Perl-interpreter into collectd. You can
134 write your own plugins in Perl and return arbitrary values using this
135 API. See collectd-perl(5).
138 Network latency: Time to reach the default gateway or another given
142 Process counts: Number of running, sleeping, zombie, ... processes.
145 System sensors, accessed using lm_sensors: Voltages, temperatures and
149 RX and TX of serial interfaces. Linux only; needs root privileges.
152 Read values from SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) enabled
153 network devices such as switches, routers, thermometers, rack monitoring
154 servers, etc. See collectd-snmp(5).
157 Pages swapped out onto harddisk or whatever is called `swap' by the OS..
160 Follows (tails) logfiles, parses them by lines and submits matched
164 Bytes and operations read and written on tape devices. Solaris only.
167 Number of TCP connections to specific local and remote ports.
170 Users currently logged in.
173 System resources used by Linux VServers.
174 See <http://linux-vserver.org/>.
177 Link quality of wireless cards. Linux only.
180 Bitrate and frequency of music played with XMMS.
182 * Output can be written or send to various destinations by the following
186 Write to comma separated values (CSV) files. This needs lots of
187 diskspace but is extremely portable and can be analysed with almost
188 every program that can analyse anything. Even Microsoft's Excel..
191 Send the data to a remote host to save the data somehow. This is useful
192 for large setups where the data should be saved by a dedicated machine.
195 Of course the values are propagated to plugins written in Perl, too, so
196 you can easily do weird stuff with the plugins we didn't dare think of
197 ;) See collectd-perl(5).
200 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using librrd. See rrdtool(1).
201 This is likely the most popular destination for such values. Since
202 updates to RRD-files are somewhat expensive this plugin can cache
203 updates to the files and write a bunch of updates at once, which lessens
207 One can query the values from the unixsock plugin whenever they're
208 needed. Please read collectd-unixsock(5) for a description on how that's
211 * Logging is, as everything in collectd, provided by plugins. The following
212 plugins keep up informed about what's going on:
215 Writes logmessages to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
218 Log messages are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
219 See collectd-perl(5).
222 Logs to the standard UNIX logging mechanism, syslog.
224 * Notifications can be handled by the following plugins:
227 Execute a program or script to handle the notification.
228 See collectd-exec(5).
231 Writes the notification message to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
234 Send the notification to a remote host to handle it somehow.
237 Notifications are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
238 See collectd-perl(5).
240 * Miscellaneous plugins:
243 Sets the hostname to an unique identifier. This is meant for setups
244 where each client may migrate to another physical host, possibly going
245 through one or more name changes in the process.
247 * Performance: Since collectd is running as a daemon it doesn't spend much
248 time starting up again and again. With the exception of the exec plugin no
249 processes are forked. Caching in output plugins, such as the rrdtool and
250 network plugins, makes sure your resources are used efficiently. Also,
251 since collectd is programmed multithreaded it benefits from hyperthreading
252 and multicore processors and makes sure that the daemon isn't idle if only
253 one plugins waits for an IO-operation to complete.
255 * Once set up, hardly any maintenance is necessary. Setup is kept as easy
256 as possible and the default values should be okay for most users.
262 * collectd's configuration file can be found at `sysconfdir'/collectd.conf.
263 Run `collectd -h' for a list of builtin defaults. See `collectd.conf(5)'
264 for a list of options and a syntax description.
266 * When the `csv' or `rrdtool' plugins are loaded they'll write the values to
267 files. The usual place for these files is beneath `/var/lib/collectd'.
269 * When using some of the plugins, collectd needs to run as user root, since
270 only root can do certain things, such as craft ICMP packages needed to ping
271 other hosts. collectd should NOT be installed setuid root since it can be
272 used to overwrite valuable files!
274 * Sample scripts to generate graphs reside in `contrib/' in the source
275 package or somewhere near `/usr/share/doc/collectd' in most distributions.
276 Please be aware that those script are meant as a starting point for your
277 own experiments.. Some of them require the `RRDs' Perl module.
278 (`librrds-perl' on Debian) If you have written a more sophisticated
279 solution please share it with us.
281 * The RRAs of the automatically created RRD files depend on the `step'
282 and `heartbeat' settings given. If change these settings you may need to
283 re-create the files, losing all data. Please be aware of that when changing
284 the values and read the rrdtool(1) manpage thoroughly.
287 collectd and chkrootkit
288 -----------------------
290 If you are using the `dns' plugin chkrootkit(1) will report collectd as a
291 packet sniffer ("<iface>: PACKET SNIFFER(/usr/sbin/collectd[<pid>])"). The
292 plugin captures all UDP packets on port 53 to analyze the DNS traffic. In
293 this case, collectd is a legitimate sniffer and the report should be
294 considered to be a false positive. However, you might want to check that
295 this really is collectd and not some other, illegitimate sniffer.
301 To compile collectd from source you will need:
303 * Usual suspects: C compiler, linker, preprocessor, make, ...
305 * A POSIX-threads (pthread) implementation.
306 Since gathering some statistics is slow (network connections, slow devices,
307 etc) the collectd is parallelized. The POSIX threads interface is being
308 used and should be found in various implementations for hopefully all
312 If you want to use the `apache' and/or `nginx' plugins.
315 If present, the uuid plugin will check for UUID from HAL.
318 For querying iptables counters.
320 * libmysqlclient (optional)
321 Unsurprisingly used by the `mysql' plugin.
323 * libnetlink (optional)
324 Used, obviously, for the `netlink' plugin.
326 * libnetsnmp (optional)
327 For the `snmp' plugin.
329 * liboping (optional, if not found a version shipped with this distribution
331 Used by the `ping' plugin to send and receive ICMP packets.
334 Used to capture packets by the `dns' plugin.
337 Obviously used by the `perl' plugin. The library has to be compiled with
338 ithread support (introduced in Perl 5.6.0).
340 * librrd (optional; headers and library; rrdtool 1.0 and 1.2 both work fine)
341 If built without `librrd' the resulting binary will be `client only', i.e.
342 will send its values via multicast and not create any RRD files itself.
343 Alternatively you can chose to write CSV-files (Comma Separated Values)
346 * libsensors (optional)
347 To read from `lm_sensors', see the `sensors' plugin.
349 * libstatgrab may be used to collect statistics on systems other than Linux
350 and/or Solaris. Note that CPU- and disk-statistics, while being provided
351 by this library, are not supported in collectd right now..
352 <http://www.i-scream.org/libstatgrab/>
354 * libupsclient/nut (optional)
355 For the `nut' plugin which queries nut's `upsd'.
359 * librt, libsocket, libkstat, libdevinfo
360 Various standard Solaris libraries which provide system functions.
362 * CoreFoundation.framework and IOKit.framework
363 For compiling on Darwin in general and the `apple_sensors' plugin in
367 Collect statistics from virtual machines.
370 Parse XML data provided by libvirt.
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.