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 CPU accounting information for process groups under Linux.
44 Number of nf_conntrack entries.
47 Number of context switches done by the operating system.
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 Parse statistics from websites using regular expressions.
60 Retrieves JSON data via cURL and parses it according to user
64 Retrieves XML data via cURL and parses it according to user
68 Executes SQL statements on various databases and interprets the returned
72 Mountpoint usage (Basically the values `df(1)' delivers)
75 Disk utilization: Sectors read/written, number of read/write actions,
76 average time an IO-operation took to complete.
79 DNS traffic: Query types, response codes, opcodes and traffic/octets
83 Email statistics: Count, traffic, spam scores and checks.
84 See collectd-email(5).
87 Amount of entropy available to the system.
90 Network interface card statistics.
93 Values gathered by a custom program or script.
97 Count the number of files in directories.
100 Linux file-system based caching framework statistics.
103 Receive multicast traffic from Ganglia instances.
106 Harddisk temperatures using hddtempd.
109 Interface traffic: Number of octets, packets and errors for each
113 Iptables' counters: Number of bytes that were matched by a certain
117 IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) sensors information.
120 IPVS connection statistics (number of connections, octets and packets
121 for each service and destination).
122 See http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/software/index.html.
125 IRQ counters: Frequency in which certain interrupts occur.
128 Integrates a `Java Virtual Machine' (JVM) to execute plugins in Java
129 bytecode. See “Configuring with libjvm” below.
132 System load average over the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes.
135 Detailed CPU statistics of the “Logical Partitions” virtualization
136 technique built into IBM's POWER processors.
139 CPU, memory, disk and network I/O statistics from virtual machines.
142 Size of “Logical Volumes” (LV) and “Volume Groups” (VG) of Linux'
143 “Logical Volume Manager” (LVM).
146 Queries very detailed usage statistics from wireless LAN adapters and
147 interfaces that use the Atheros chipset and the MadWifi driver.
150 Motherboard sensors: temperature, fanspeed and voltage information,
154 Linux software-RAID device information (number of active, failed, spare
158 Query and parse data from a memcache daemon (memcached).
161 Statistics of the memcached distributed caching system.
162 <http://www.danga.com/memcached/>
165 Memory utilization: Memory occupied by running processes, page cache,
166 buffer cache and free.
169 Collects CPU usage, memory usage, temperatures and power consumption from
170 Intel Many Integrated Core (MIC) CPUs.
173 Reads values from Modbus/TCP enabled devices. Supports reading values
174 from multiple "slaves" so gateway devices can be used.
177 Information provided by serial multimeters, such as the `Metex
181 MySQL server statistics: Commands issued, handlers triggered, thread
182 usage, query cache utilization and traffic/octets sent and received.
185 Plugin to query performance values from a NetApp storage system using the
186 “Manage ONTAP” SDK provided by NetApp.
189 Very detailed Linux network interface and routing statistics. You can get
190 (detailed) information on interfaces, qdiscs, classes, and, if you can
191 make use of it, filters.
194 Receive values that were collected by other hosts. Large setups will
195 want to collect the data on one dedicated machine, and this is the
196 plugin of choice for that.
199 NFS Procedures: Which NFS command were called how often. Only NFSv2 and
203 Collects statistics from `nginx' (speak: engine X), a HTTP and mail
207 NTP daemon statistics: Local clock drift, offset to peers, etc.
210 Network UPS tools: UPS current, voltage, power, charge, utilisation,
211 temperature, etc. See upsd(8).
214 Information about Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA).
217 Queries routing information from the “Optimized Link State Routing”
220 - onewire (EXPERIMENTAL!)
221 Read onewire sensors using the owcapu library of the owfs project.
222 Please read in collectd.conf(5) why this plugin is experimental.
225 RX and TX of each client in openvpn-status.log (status-version 2).
226 <http://openvpn.net/index.php/documentation/howto.html>
229 Query data from an Oracle database.
232 The perl plugin implements a Perl-interpreter into collectd. You can
233 write your own plugins in Perl and return arbitrary values using this
234 API. See collectd-perl(5).
237 Query statistics from BSD's packet filter "pf".
240 Receive and dispatch timing values from Pinba, a profiling extension for
244 Network latency: Time to reach the default gateway or another given
248 PostgreSQL database statistics: active server connections, transaction
249 numbers, block IO, table row manipulations.
252 PowerDNS name server statistics.
255 Process counts: Number of running, sleeping, zombie, ... processes.
258 Counts various aspects of network protocols such as IP, TCP, UDP, etc.
261 The python plugin implements a Python interpreter into collectd. This
262 makes it possible to write plugins in Python which are executed by
263 collectd without the need to start a heavy interpreter every interval.
264 See collectd-python(5) for details.
267 The redis plugin gathers information from a redis server, including:
268 uptime, used memory, total connections etc.
271 Query interface and wireless registration statistics from RouterOS.
274 RRDtool caching daemon (RRDcacheD) statistics.
277 System sensors, accessed using lm_sensors: Voltages, temperatures and
281 RX and TX of serial interfaces. Linux only; needs root privileges.
284 Uses libsigrok as a backend, allowing any sigrok-supported device
285 to have its measurements fed to collectd. This includes multimeters,
286 sound level meters, thermometers, and much more.
289 Read values from SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) enabled
290 network devices such as switches, routers, thermometers, rack monitoring
291 servers, etc. See collectd-snmp(5).
294 Pages swapped out onto harddisk or whatever is called `swap' by the OS..
297 Parse table-like structured files.
300 Follows (tails) logfiles, parses them by lines and submits matched
304 Follows (tails) files in CSV format, parses each line and submits
308 Bytes and operations read and written on tape devices. Solaris only.
311 Number of TCP connections to specific local and remote ports.
314 TeamSpeak2 server statistics.
317 Plugin to read values from `The Energy Detective' (TED).
320 Linux ACPI thermal zone information.
323 Reads the number of records and file size from a running Tokyo Tyrant
327 System uptime statistics.
330 Users currently logged in.
333 Various statistics from Varnish, an HTTP accelerator.
336 Virtual memory statistics, e. g. the number of page-ins/-outs or the
337 number of pagefaults.
340 System resources used by Linux VServers.
341 See <http://linux-vserver.org/>.
344 Link quality of wireless cards. Linux only.
347 Bitrate and frequency of music played with XMMS.
350 Statistics for ZFS' “Adaptive Replacement Cache” (ARC).
352 * Output can be written or sent to various destinations by the following
356 Sends JSON-encoded data to an Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP)
357 server, such as RabbitMQ.
360 Write to comma separated values (CSV) files. This needs lots of
361 diskspace but is extremely portable and can be analysed with almost
362 every program that can analyse anything. Even Microsoft's Excel..
365 Send the data to a remote host to save the data somehow. This is useful
366 for large setups where the data should be saved by a dedicated machine.
369 Of course the values are propagated to plugins written in Perl, too, so
370 you can easily do weird stuff with the plugins we didn't dare think of
371 ;) See collectd-perl(5).
374 It's possible to implement write plugins in Python using the python
375 plugin. See collectd-python(5) for details.
378 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using the RRDtool caching
379 daemon (RRDcacheD) - see rrdcached(1). That daemon provides a general
380 implementation of the caching done by the `rrdtool' plugin.
383 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using librrd. See rrdtool(1).
384 This is likely the most popular destination for such values. Since
385 updates to RRD-files are somewhat expensive this plugin can cache
386 updates to the files and write a bunch of updates at once, which lessens
390 One can query the values from the unixsock plugin whenever they're
391 needed. Please read collectd-unixsock(5) for a description on how that's
395 Sends data to Carbon, the storage layer of Graphite using TCP or UDP. It
396 can be configured to avoid logging send errors (especially useful when
400 Sends the values collected by collectd to a web-server using HTTP POST
401 requests. The transmitted data is either in a form understood by the
402 Exec plugin or formatted in JSON.
405 Sends data to MongoDB, a NoSQL database.
408 Sends the values to a Redis key-value database server.
411 Sends data to Riemann, a stream processing and monitoring system.
413 * Logging is, as everything in collectd, provided by plugins. The following
414 plugins keep up informed about what's going on:
417 Writes logmessages to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
420 Log messages are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
421 See collectd-perl(5).
424 It's possible to implement log plugins in Python using the python plugin.
425 See collectd-python(5) for details.
428 Logs to the standard UNIX logging mechanism, syslog.
430 * Notifications can be handled by the following plugins:
433 Send a desktop notification to a notification daemon, as defined in
434 the Desktop Notification Specification. To actually display the
435 notifications, notification-daemon is required.
436 See http://www.galago-project.org/specs/notification/.
439 Send an E-mail with the notification message to the configured
443 Execute a program or script to handle the notification.
444 See collectd-exec(5).
447 Writes the notification message to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
450 Send the notification to a remote host to handle it somehow.
453 Notifications are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
454 See collectd-perl(5).
457 It's possible to implement notification plugins in Python using the
458 python plugin. See collectd-python(5) for details.
460 * Value processing can be controlled using the "filter chain" infrastructure
461 and "matches" and "targets". The following plugins are available:
463 - match_empty_counter
464 Match counter values which are currently zero.
467 Match values using a hash function of the hostname.
470 Match values by their identifier based on regular expressions.
473 Match values with an invalid timestamp.
476 Select values by their data sources' values.
478 - target_notification
479 Create and dispatch a notification.
482 Replace parts of an identifier using regular expressions.
485 Scale (multiply) values by an arbitrary value.
488 Set (overwrite) entire parts of an identifier.
490 * Miscellaneous plugins:
493 Selects multiple value lists based on patterns or regular expressions
494 and creates new aggregated values lists from those.
497 Checks values against configured thresholds and creates notifications if
498 values are out of bounds. See collectd-threshold(5) for details.
501 Sets the hostname to an unique identifier. This is meant for setups
502 where each client may migrate to another physical host, possibly going
503 through one or more name changes in the process.
505 * Performance: Since collectd is running as a daemon it doesn't spend much
506 time starting up again and again. With the exception of the exec plugin no
507 processes are forked. Caching in output plugins, such as the rrdtool and
508 network plugins, makes sure your resources are used efficiently. Also,
509 since collectd is programmed multithreaded it benefits from hyperthreading
510 and multicore processors and makes sure that the daemon isn't idle if only
511 one plugin waits for an IO-operation to complete.
513 * Once set up, hardly any maintenance is necessary. Setup is kept as easy
514 as possible and the default values should be okay for most users.
520 * collectd's configuration file can be found at `sysconfdir'/collectd.conf.
521 Run `collectd -h' for a list of builtin defaults. See `collectd.conf(5)'
522 for a list of options and a syntax description.
524 * When the `csv' or `rrdtool' plugins are loaded they'll write the values to
525 files. The usual place for these files is beneath `/var/lib/collectd'.
527 * When using some of the plugins, collectd needs to run as user root, since
528 only root can do certain things, such as craft ICMP packages needed to ping
529 other hosts. collectd should NOT be installed setuid root since it can be
530 used to overwrite valuable files!
532 * Sample scripts to generate graphs reside in `contrib/' in the source
533 package or somewhere near `/usr/share/doc/collectd' in most distributions.
534 Please be aware that those script are meant as a starting point for your
535 own experiments.. Some of them require the `RRDs' Perl module.
536 (`librrds-perl' on Debian) If you have written a more sophisticated
537 solution please share it with us.
539 * The RRAs of the automatically created RRD files depend on the `step'
540 and `heartbeat' settings given. If change these settings you may need to
541 re-create the files, losing all data. Please be aware of that when changing
542 the values and read the rrdtool(1) manpage thoroughly.
545 collectd and chkrootkit
546 -----------------------
548 If you are using the `dns' plugin chkrootkit(1) will report collectd as a
549 packet sniffer ("<iface>: PACKET SNIFFER(/usr/sbin/collectd[<pid>])"). The
550 plugin captures all UDP packets on port 53 to analyze the DNS traffic. In
551 this case, collectd is a legitimate sniffer and the report should be
552 considered to be a false positive. However, you might want to check that
553 this really is collectd and not some other, illegitimate sniffer.
559 To compile collectd from source you will need:
561 * Usual suspects: C compiler, linker, preprocessor, make, ...
563 * A POSIX-threads (pthread) implementation.
564 Since gathering some statistics is slow (network connections, slow devices,
565 etc) the collectd is parallelized. The POSIX threads interface is being
566 used and should be found in various implementations for hopefully all
569 * CoreFoundation.framework and IOKit.framework (optional)
570 For compiling on Darwin in general and the `apple_sensors' plugin in
572 <http://developer.apple.com/corefoundation/>
574 * libclntsh (optional)
575 Used by the `oracle' plugin.
577 * libcredis (optional)
578 Used by the redis plugin. Please note that you require a 0.2.2 version
579 or higher. <http://code.google.com/p/credis/>
582 If you want to use the `apache', `ascent', `curl', `nginx', or `write_http'
584 <http://curl.haxx.se/>
587 Used by the `dbi' plugin to connect to various databases.
588 <http://libdbi.sourceforge.net/>
590 * libesmtp (optional)
591 For the `notify_email' plugin.
592 <http://www.stafford.uklinux.net/libesmtp/>
594 * libganglia (optional)
595 Used by the `gmond' plugin to process data received from Ganglia.
596 <http://ganglia.info/>
598 * libgcrypt (optional)
599 Used by the `network' plugin for encryption and authentication.
600 <http://www.gnupg.org/>
603 If present, the uuid plugin will check for UUID from HAL.
604 <http://hal.freedesktop.org/>
607 For querying iptables counters.
608 <http://netfilter.org/>
610 If not found on the system, a version shipped with this distribution can
611 be used. It requires some Linux headers in /usr/include/linux. You can
612 force the build system to use the shipped version by specifying
613 --with-libiptc=shipped
614 when running the configure script.
617 Library that encapsulates the `Java Virtual Machine' (JVM). This library is
618 used by the Java plugin to execute Java bytecode. See “Configuring with
620 <http://openjdk.java.net/> (and others)
622 * libmemcached (optional)
623 Used by the `memcachec' plugin to connect to a memcache daemon.
624 <http://tangent.org/552/libmemcached.html>
627 Used by the `netlink' plugin.
628 <http://www.netfilter.org/projects/libmnl/>
630 * libmodbus (optional)
631 Used by the “modbus” plugin to communicate with Modbus/TCP devices. The
632 “modbus” plugin works with version 2.0.3 of the library – due to frequent
633 API changes other versions may or may not compile cleanly.
634 <http://www.libmodbus.org/>
636 * libmysqlclient (optional)
637 Unsurprisingly used by the `mysql' plugin.
638 <http://dev.mysql.com/>
640 * libnetapp (optional)
641 Required for the “netapp” plugin.
642 This library is part of the “Manage ONTAP SDK” published by NetApp.
644 * libnetsnmp (optional)
645 For the `snmp' plugin.
646 <http://www.net-snmp.org/>
648 * libnotify (optional)
649 For the `notify_desktop' plugin.
650 <http://www.galago-project.org/>
652 * liboping (optional)
653 Used by the `ping' plugin to send and receive ICMP packets.
654 <http://verplant.org/liboping/>
656 * libowcapi (optional)
657 Used by the `onewire' plugin to read values from onewire sensors (or the
659 <http://www.owfs.org/>
662 Used to capture packets by the `dns' plugin.
663 <http://www.tcpdump.org/>
665 * libperfstat (optional)
666 Used by various plugins to gather statistics under AIX.
669 Obviously used by the `perl' plugin. The library has to be compiled with
670 ithread support (introduced in Perl 5.6.0).
671 <http://www.perl.org/>
674 The PostgreSQL C client library used by the `postgresql' plugin.
675 <http://www.postgresql.org/>
677 * libprotobuf-c, protoc-c (optional)
678 Used by the `pinba' plugin to generate a parser for the network packets
679 sent by the Pinba PHP extension.
680 <http://code.google.com/p/protobuf-c/>
682 * libpython (optional)
683 Used by the `python' plugin. Currently, Python 2.3 and later and Python 3
685 <http://www.python.org/>
687 * librabbitmq (optional; also called “rabbitmq-c”)
688 Used by the AMQP plugin for AMQP connections, for example to RabbitMQ.
689 <http://hg.rabbitmq.com/rabbitmq-c/>
691 * librouteros (optional)
692 Used by the `routeros' plugin to connect to a device running `RouterOS'.
693 <http://verplant.org/librouteros/>
696 Used by the `rrdtool' and `rrdcached' plugins. The latter requires RRDtool
697 client support which was added after version 1.3 of RRDtool. Versions 1.0,
698 1.2 and 1.3 are known to work with the `rrdtool' plugin.
699 <http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/>
701 * librt, libsocket, libkstat, libdevinfo (optional)
702 Various standard Solaris libraries which provide system functions.
703 <http://developers.sun.com/solaris/>
705 * libsensors (optional)
706 To read from `lm_sensors', see the `sensors' plugin.
707 <http://www.lm-sensors.org/>
709 * libstatgrab (optional)
710 Used by various plugins to collect statistics on systems other than Linux
712 <http://www.i-scream.org/libstatgrab/>
714 * libtokyotyrant (optional)
715 Used by the tokyotyrant plugin.
716 <http://1978th.net/tokyotyrant/>
718 * libupsclient/nut (optional)
719 For the `nut' plugin which queries nut's `upsd'.
720 <http://networkupstools.org/>
723 Collect statistics from virtual machines.
724 <http://libvirt.org/>
727 Parse XML data. This is needed for the `ascent' and `libvirt' plugins.
728 <http://xmlsoft.org/>
731 <http://www.xmms.org/>
734 Parse JSON data. This is needed for the `curl_json' plugin.
735 <http://github.com/lloyd/yajl>
737 * libvarnish (optional)
738 Fetches statistics from a Varnish instance. This is needed for the Varnish plugin
739 <http://varnish-cache.org>
741 Configuring / Compiling / Installing
742 ------------------------------------
744 To configure, build and install collectd with the default settings, run
745 `./configure && make && make install'. For detailed, generic instructions
746 see INSTALL. For a complete list of configure options and their description,
747 run `./configure --help'.
749 By default, the configure script will check for all build dependencies and
750 disable all plugins whose requirements cannot be fulfilled (any other plugin
751 will be enabled). To enable a plugin, install missing dependencies (see
752 section `Prerequisites' above) and rerun `configure'. If you specify the
753 `--enable-<plugin>' configure option, the script will fail if the depen-
754 dencies for the specified plugin are not met. In that case you can force the
755 plugin to be built using the `--enable-<plugin>=force' configure option.
756 This will most likely fail though unless you're working in a very unusual
757 setup and you really know what you're doing. If you specify the
758 `--disable-<plugin>' configure option, the plugin will not be built. If you
759 specify the `--enable-all-plugins' or `--disable-all-plugins' configure
760 options, all plugins will be enabled or disabled respectively by default.
761 Explicitly enabling or disabling a plugin overwrites the default for the
762 specified plugin. These options are meant for package maintainers and should
763 not be used in everyday situations.
765 By default, collectd will be installed into `/opt/collectd'. You can adjust
766 this setting by specifying the `--prefix' configure option - see INSTALL for
767 details. If you pass DESTDIR=<path> to `make install', <path> will be
768 prefixed to all installation directories. This might be useful when creating
769 packages for collectd.
771 Configuring with libjvm
772 -----------------------
774 To determine the location of the required files of a Java installation is not
775 an easy task, because the locations vary with your kernel (Linux, SunOS, …)
776 and with your architecture (x86, SPARC, …) and there is no ‘java-config’
777 script we could use. Configuration of the JVM library is therefore a bit
780 The easiest way to use the `--with-java=$JAVA_HOME' option, where
781 `$JAVA_HOME' is usually something like:
782 /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0.14
784 The configure script will then use find(1) to look for the following files:
790 If found, appropriate CPP-flags and LD-flags are set and the following
791 library checks succeed.
793 If this doesn't work for you, you have the possibility to specify CPP-flags,
794 C-flags and LD-flags for the ‘Java’ plugin by hand, using the following three
795 (environment) variables:
801 For example (shortened for demonstration purposes):
803 ./configure JAVA_CPPFLAGS="-I$JAVA_HOME/include -I$JAVA_HOME/include/linux"
805 Adding "-ljvm" to the JAVA_LDFLAGS is done automatically, you don't have to
811 To compile correctly collectd needs to be able to initialize static
812 variables to NAN (Not A Number). Some C libraries, especially the GNU
813 libc, have a problem with that.
815 Luckily, with GCC it's possible to work around that problem: One can define
816 NAN as being (0.0 / 0.0) and `isnan' as `f != f'. However, to test this
817 ``implementation'' the configure script needs to compile and run a short
818 test program. Obviously running a test program when doing a cross-
819 compilation is, well, challenging.
821 If you run into this problem, you can use the `--with-nan-emulation'
822 configure option to force the use of this implementation. We can't promise
823 that the compiled binary actually behaves as it should, but since NANs
824 are likely never passed to the libm you have a good chance to be lucky.
826 Likewise, collectd needs to know the layout of doubles in memory, in order
827 to craft uniform network packets over different architectures. For this, it
828 needs to know how to convert doubles into the memory layout used by x86. The
829 configure script tries to figure this out by compiling and running a few
830 small test programs. This is of course not possible when cross-compiling.
831 You can use the `--with-fp-layout' option to tell the configure script which
832 conversion method to assume. Valid arguments are:
834 * `nothing' (12345678 -> 12345678)
835 * `endianflip' (12345678 -> 87654321)
836 * `intswap' (12345678 -> 56781234)
842 For questions, bug reports, development information and basically all other
843 concerns please send an email to collectd's mailing list at
844 <collectd at verplant.org>.
846 For live discussion and more personal contact visit us in IRC, we're in
847 channel #collectd on freenode.
853 Florian octo Forster <octo at verplant.org>,
854 Sebastian tokkee Harl <sh at tokkee.org>,
855 and many contributors (see `AUTHORS').
857 Please send bug reports and patches to the mailing list, see `Contact'