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 Retrieves XML data via cURL and parses it according to user
65 Executes SQL statements on various databases and interprets the returned
69 Mountpoint usage (Basically the values `df(1)' delivers)
72 Disk utilization: Sectors read/written, number of read/write actions,
73 average time an IO-operation took to complete.
76 DNS traffic: Query types, response codes, opcodes and traffic/octets
80 Email statistics: Count, traffic, spam scores and checks.
81 See collectd-email(5).
84 Amount of entropy available to the system.
87 Values gathered by a custom program or script.
91 Count the number of files in directories.
94 Linux file-system based caching framework statistics.
97 Receive multicast traffic from Ganglia instances.
100 Harddisk temperatures using hddtempd.
103 Interface traffic: Number of octets, packets and errors for each
107 Iptables' counters: Number of bytes that were matched by a certain
111 IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) sensors information.
114 IPVS connection statistics (number of connections, octets and packets
115 for each service and destination).
116 See http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/software/index.html.
119 IRQ counters: Frequency in which certain interrupts occur.
122 Integrates a `Java Virtual Machine' (JVM) to execute plugins in Java
123 bytecode. See “Configuring with libjvm” below.
126 System load average over the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes.
129 CPU, disk and network I/O statistics from virtual machines.
132 Queries very detailed usage statistics from wireless LAN adapters and
133 interfaces that use the Atheros chipset and the MadWifi driver.
136 Motherboard sensors: temperature, fanspeed and voltage information,
140 Query and parse data from a memcache daemon (memcached).
143 Statistics of the memcached distributed caching system.
144 <http://www.danga.com/memcached/>
147 Memory utilization: Memory occupied by running processes, page cache,
148 buffer cache and free.
151 Reads values from Modbus/TCP enabled devices. Supports reading values
152 from multiple "slaves" so gateway devices can be used.
155 Information provided by serial multimeters, such as the `Metex
159 MySQL server statistics: Commands issued, handlers triggered, thread
160 usage, query cache utilization and traffic/octets sent and received.
163 Plugin to query performance values from a NetApp storage system using the
164 “Manage ONTAP” SDK provided by NetApp.
167 Very detailed Linux network interface and routing statistics. You can get
168 (detailed) information on interfaces, qdiscs, classes, and, if you can
169 make use of it, filters.
172 Receive values that were collected by other hosts. Large setups will
173 want to collect the data on one dedicated machine, and this is the
174 plugin of choice for that.
177 NFS Procedures: Which NFS command were called how often. Only NFSv2 and
181 Collects statistics from `nginx' (speak: engine X), a HTTP and mail
185 NTP daemon statistics: Local clock drift, offset to peers, etc.
188 Network UPS tools: UPS current, voltage, power, charge, utilisation,
189 temperature, etc. See upsd(8).
192 Queries routing information from the “Optimized Link State Routing”
195 - onewire (EXPERIMENTAL!)
196 Read onewire sensors using the owcapu library of the owfs project.
197 Please read in collectd.conf(5) why this plugin is experimental.
200 RX and TX of each client in openvpn-status.log (status-version 2).
201 <http://openvpn.net/index.php/documentation/howto.html>
204 Query data from an Oracle database.
207 The perl plugin implements a Perl-interpreter into collectd. You can
208 write your own plugins in Perl and return arbitrary values using this
209 API. See collectd-perl(5).
212 Receive and dispatch timing values from Pinba, a profiling extension for
216 Network latency: Time to reach the default gateway or another given
220 PostgreSQL database statistics: active server connections, transaction
221 numbers, block IO, table row manipulations.
224 PowerDNS name server statistics.
227 Process counts: Number of running, sleeping, zombie, ... processes.
230 Counts various aspects of network protocols such as IP, TCP, UDP, etc.
233 The python plugin implements a Python interpreter into collectd. This
234 makes it possible to write plugins in Python which are executed by
235 collectd without the need to start a heavy interpreter every interval.
236 See collectd-python(5) for details.
239 The redis plugin gathers information from a redis server, including:
240 uptime, used memory, total connections etc.
243 Query interface and wireless registration statistics from RouterOS.
246 RRDtool caching daemon (RRDcacheD) statistics.
249 System sensors, accessed using lm_sensors: Voltages, temperatures and
253 RX and TX of serial interfaces. Linux only; needs root privileges.
256 Read values from SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) enabled
257 network devices such as switches, routers, thermometers, rack monitoring
258 servers, etc. See collectd-snmp(5).
261 Pages swapped out onto harddisk or whatever is called `swap' by the OS..
264 Parse table-like structured files.
267 Follows (tails) logfiles, parses them by lines and submits matched
271 Bytes and operations read and written on tape devices. Solaris only.
274 Number of TCP connections to specific local and remote ports.
277 TeamSpeak2 server statistics.
280 Plugin to read values from `The Energy Detective' (TED).
283 Linux ACPI thermal zone information.
286 Reads the number of records and file size from a running Tokyo Tyrant
290 System uptime statistics.
293 Users currently logged in.
296 Various statistics from Varnish, an HTTP accelerator.
299 Virtual memory statistics, e. g. the number of page-ins/-outs or the
300 number of pagefaults.
303 System resources used by Linux VServers.
304 See <http://linux-vserver.org/>.
307 Link quality of wireless cards. Linux only.
310 Bitrate and frequency of music played with XMMS.
313 Statistics for ZFS' “Adaptive Replacement Cache” (ARC).
315 * Output can be written or sent to various destinations by the following
319 Write to comma separated values (CSV) files. This needs lots of
320 diskspace but is extremely portable and can be analysed with almost
321 every program that can analyse anything. Even Microsoft's Excel..
324 Send the data to a remote host to save the data somehow. This is useful
325 for large setups where the data should be saved by a dedicated machine.
328 Of course the values are propagated to plugins written in Perl, too, so
329 you can easily do weird stuff with the plugins we didn't dare think of
330 ;) See collectd-perl(5).
333 It's possible to implement write plugins in Python using the python
334 plugin. See collectd-python(5) for details.
337 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using the RRDtool caching
338 daemon (RRDcacheD) - see rrdcached(1). That daemon provides a general
339 implementation of the caching done by the `rrdtool' plugin.
342 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using librrd. See rrdtool(1).
343 This is likely the most popular destination for such values. Since
344 updates to RRD-files are somewhat expensive this plugin can cache
345 updates to the files and write a bunch of updates at once, which lessens
349 One can query the values from the unixsock plugin whenever they're
350 needed. Please read collectd-unixsock(5) for a description on how that's
354 Sends the values collected by collectd to a web-server using HTTP POST
355 requests. The transmitted data is either in a form understood by the
356 Exec plugin or formatted in JSON.
358 * Logging is, as everything in collectd, provided by plugins. The following
359 plugins keep up informed about what's going on:
362 Writes logmessages to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
365 Log messages are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
366 See collectd-perl(5).
369 It's possible to implement log plugins in Python using the python plugin.
370 See collectd-python(5) for details.
373 Logs to the standard UNIX logging mechanism, syslog.
375 * Notifications can be handled by the following plugins:
378 Send a desktop notification to a notification daemon, as defined in
379 the Desktop Notification Specification. To actually display the
380 notifications, notification-daemon is required.
381 See http://www.galago-project.org/specs/notification/.
384 Send an E-mail with the notification message to the configured
388 Execute a program or script to handle the notification.
389 See collectd-exec(5).
392 Writes the notification message to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
395 Send the notification to a remote host to handle it somehow.
398 Notifications are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
399 See collectd-perl(5).
402 It's possible to implement notification plugins in Python using the
403 python plugin. See collectd-python(5) for details.
405 * Value processing can be controlled using the "filter chain" infrastructure
406 and "matches" and "targets". The following plugins are available:
408 - match_empty_counter
409 Match counter values which are currently zero.
412 Match values using a hash function of the hostname.
415 Match values by their identifier based on regular expressions.
418 Match values with an invalid timestamp.
421 Select values by their data sources' values.
423 - target_notification
424 Create and dispatch a notification.
427 Replace parts of an identifier using regular expressions.
430 Scale (multiply) values by an arbitrary value.
433 Set (overwrite) entire parts of an identifier.
435 * Miscellaneous plugins:
438 Sets the hostname to an unique identifier. This is meant for setups
439 where each client may migrate to another physical host, possibly going
440 through one or more name changes in the process.
442 * Performance: Since collectd is running as a daemon it doesn't spend much
443 time starting up again and again. With the exception of the exec plugin no
444 processes are forked. Caching in output plugins, such as the rrdtool and
445 network plugins, makes sure your resources are used efficiently. Also,
446 since collectd is programmed multithreaded it benefits from hyperthreading
447 and multicore processors and makes sure that the daemon isn't idle if only
448 one plugin waits for an IO-operation to complete.
450 * Once set up, hardly any maintenance is necessary. Setup is kept as easy
451 as possible and the default values should be okay for most users.
457 * collectd's configuration file can be found at `sysconfdir'/collectd.conf.
458 Run `collectd -h' for a list of builtin defaults. See `collectd.conf(5)'
459 for a list of options and a syntax description.
461 * When the `csv' or `rrdtool' plugins are loaded they'll write the values to
462 files. The usual place for these files is beneath `/var/lib/collectd'.
464 * When using some of the plugins, collectd needs to run as user root, since
465 only root can do certain things, such as craft ICMP packages needed to ping
466 other hosts. collectd should NOT be installed setuid root since it can be
467 used to overwrite valuable files!
469 * Sample scripts to generate graphs reside in `contrib/' in the source
470 package or somewhere near `/usr/share/doc/collectd' in most distributions.
471 Please be aware that those script are meant as a starting point for your
472 own experiments.. Some of them require the `RRDs' Perl module.
473 (`librrds-perl' on Debian) If you have written a more sophisticated
474 solution please share it with us.
476 * The RRAs of the automatically created RRD files depend on the `step'
477 and `heartbeat' settings given. If change these settings you may need to
478 re-create the files, losing all data. Please be aware of that when changing
479 the values and read the rrdtool(1) manpage thoroughly.
482 collectd and chkrootkit
483 -----------------------
485 If you are using the `dns' plugin chkrootkit(1) will report collectd as a
486 packet sniffer ("<iface>: PACKET SNIFFER(/usr/sbin/collectd[<pid>])"). The
487 plugin captures all UDP packets on port 53 to analyze the DNS traffic. In
488 this case, collectd is a legitimate sniffer and the report should be
489 considered to be a false positive. However, you might want to check that
490 this really is collectd and not some other, illegitimate sniffer.
496 To compile collectd from source you will need:
498 * Usual suspects: C compiler, linker, preprocessor, make, ...
500 * A POSIX-threads (pthread) implementation.
501 Since gathering some statistics is slow (network connections, slow devices,
502 etc) the collectd is parallelized. The POSIX threads interface is being
503 used and should be found in various implementations for hopefully all
506 * CoreFoundation.framework and IOKit.framework (optional)
507 For compiling on Darwin in general and the `apple_sensors' plugin in
509 <http://developer.apple.com/corefoundation/>
511 * libclntsh (optional)
512 Used by the `oracle' plugin.
514 * libcredis (optional)
515 Used by the redis plugin. Please note that you require a 0.2.2 version
516 or higher. <http://code.google.com/p/credis/>
519 If you want to use the `apache', `ascent', `curl', `nginx', or `write_http'
521 <http://curl.haxx.se/>
524 Used by the `dbi' plugin to connect to various databases.
525 <http://libdbi.sourceforge.net/>
527 * libesmtp (optional)
528 For the `notify_email' plugin.
529 <http://www.stafford.uklinux.net/libesmtp/>
531 * libganglia (optional)
532 Used by the `gmond' plugin to process data received from Ganglia.
533 <http://ganglia.info/>
535 * libgcrypt (optional)
536 Used by the `network' plugin for encryption and authentication.
537 <http://www.gnupg.org/>
540 If present, the uuid plugin will check for UUID from HAL.
541 <http://hal.freedesktop.org/>
544 For querying iptables counters.
545 <http://netfilter.org/>
547 If not found on the system, a version shipped with this distribution can
548 be used. It requires some Linux headers in /usr/include/linux. You can
549 force the build system to use the shipped version by specifying
550 --with-libiptc=shipped
551 when running the configure script.
554 Library that encapsulates the `Java Virtual Machine' (JVM). This library is
555 used by the Java plugin to execute Java bytecode. See “Configuring with
557 <http://openjdk.java.net/> (and others)
559 * libmemcached (optional)
560 Used by the `memcachec' plugin to connect to a memcache daemon.
561 <http://tangent.org/552/libmemcached.html>
563 * libmodbus (optional)
564 Used by the `modbus' plugin to communicate with Modbus/TCP devices.
565 <https://launchpad.net/libmodbus>
567 * libmysqlclient (optional)
568 Unsurprisingly used by the `mysql' plugin.
569 <http://dev.mysql.com/>
571 * libnetapp (optional)
572 Required for the “netapp” plugin.
573 This library is part of the “Manage ONTAP SDK” published by NetApp.
575 * libnetlink (optional)
576 Used, obviously, for the `netlink' plugin.
577 <http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Net:Iproute2>
579 * libnetsnmp (optional)
580 For the `snmp' plugin.
581 <http://www.net-snmp.org/>
583 * libnotify (optional)
584 For the `notify_desktop' plugin.
585 <http://www.galago-project.org/>
587 * liboping (optional)
588 Used by the `ping' plugin to send and receive ICMP packets.
589 <http://verplant.org/liboping/>
591 * libowcapi (optional)
592 Used by the `onewire' plugin to read values from onewire sensors (or the
594 <http://www.owfs.org/>
597 Used to capture packets by the `dns' plugin.
598 <http://www.tcpdump.org/>
601 Obviously used by the `perl' plugin. The library has to be compiled with
602 ithread support (introduced in Perl 5.6.0).
603 <http://www.perl.org/>
606 The PostgreSQL C client library used by the `postgresql' plugin.
607 <http://www.postgresql.org/>
609 * libprotobuf-c, protoc-c (optional)
610 Used by the `pinba' plugin to generate a parser for the network packets
611 sent by the Pinba PHP extension.
612 <http://code.google.com/p/protobuf-c/>
614 * libpython (optional)
615 Used by the `python' plugin. Currently, only 2.3 ≦ Python < 3 is supported.
616 <http://www.python.org/>
618 * librouteros (optional)
619 Used by the `routeros' plugin to connect to a device running `RouterOS'.
620 <http://verplant.org/librouteros/>
623 Used by the `rrdtool' and `rrdcached' plugins. The latter requires RRDtool
624 client support which was added after version 1.3 of RRDtool. Versions 1.0,
625 1.2 and 1.3 are known to work with the `rrdtool' plugin.
626 <http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/>
628 * librt, libsocket, libkstat, libdevinfo (optional)
629 Various standard Solaris libraries which provide system functions.
630 <http://developers.sun.com/solaris/>
632 * libsensors (optional)
633 To read from `lm_sensors', see the `sensors' plugin.
634 <http://www.lm-sensors.org/>
636 * libstatgrab (optional)
637 Used by various plugins to collect statistics on systems other than Linux
639 <http://www.i-scream.org/libstatgrab/>
641 * libtokyotyrant (optional)
642 Used by the tokyotyrant plugin.
643 <http://1978th.net/tokyotyrant/>
645 * libupsclient/nut (optional)
646 For the `nut' plugin which queries nut's `upsd'.
647 <http://networkupstools.org/>
650 Collect statistics from virtual machines.
651 <http://libvirt.org/>
654 Parse XML data. This is needed for the `ascent' and `libvirt' plugins.
655 <http://xmlsoft.org/>
658 <http://www.xmms.org/>
661 Parse JSON data. This is needed for the `curl_json' plugin.
662 <http://github.com/lloyd/yajl>
664 * libvarnish (optional)
665 Fetches statistics from a Varnish instance. This is needed for the Varnish plugin
666 <http://varnish-cache.org>
668 Configuring / Compiling / Installing
669 ------------------------------------
671 To configure, build and install collectd with the default settings, run
672 `./configure && make && make install'. For detailed, generic instructions
673 see INSTALL. For a complete list of configure options and their description,
674 run `./configure --help'.
676 By default, the configure script will check for all build dependencies and
677 disable all plugins whose requirements cannot be fulfilled (any other plugin
678 will be enabled). To enable a plugin, install missing dependencies (see
679 section `Prerequisites' above) and rerun `configure'. If you specify the
680 `--enable-<plugin>' configure option, the script will fail if the depen-
681 dencies for the specified plugin are not met. In that case you can force the
682 plugin to be built using the `--enable-<plugin>=force' configure option.
683 This will most likely fail though unless you're working in a very unusual
684 setup and you really know what you're doing. If you specify the
685 `--disable-<plugin>' configure option, the plugin will not be built. If you
686 specify the `--enable-all-plugins' or `--disable-all-plugins' configure
687 options, all plugins will be enabled or disabled respectively by default.
688 Explicitly enabling or disabling a plugin overwrites the default for the
689 specified plugin. These options are meant for package maintainers and should
690 not be used in everyday situations.
692 By default, collectd will be installed into `/opt/collectd'. You can adjust
693 this setting by specifying the `--prefix' configure option - see INSTALL for
694 details. If you pass DESTDIR=<path> to `make install', <path> will be
695 prefixed to all installation directories. This might be useful when creating
696 packages for collectd.
698 Configuring with libjvm
699 -----------------------
701 To determine the location of the required files of a Java installation is not
702 an easy task, because the locations vary with your kernel (Linux, SunOS, …)
703 and with your architecture (x86, SPARC, …) and there is no ‘java-config’
704 script we could use. Configuration of the JVM library is therefore a bit
707 The easiest way to use the `--with-java=$JAVA_HOME' option, where
708 `$JAVA_HOME' is usually something like:
709 /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0.14
711 The configure script will then use find(1) to look for the following files:
717 If found, appropriate CPP-flags and LD-flags are set and the following
718 library checks succeed.
720 If this doesn't work for you, you have the possibility to specify CPP-flags,
721 C-flags and LD-flags for the ‘Java’ plugin by hand, using the following three
722 (environment) variables:
728 For example (shortened for demonstration purposes):
730 ./configure JAVA_CPPFLAGS="-I$JAVA_HOME/include -I$JAVA_HOME/include/linux"
732 Adding "-ljvm" to the JAVA_LDFLAGS is done automatically, you don't have to
738 To compile correctly collectd needs to be able to initialize static
739 variables to NAN (Not A Number). Some C libraries, especially the GNU
740 libc, have a problem with that.
742 Luckily, with GCC it's possible to work around that problem: One can define
743 NAN as being (0.0 / 0.0) and `isnan' as `f != f'. However, to test this
744 ``implementation'' the configure script needs to compile and run a short
745 test program. Obviously running a test program when doing a cross-
746 compilation is, well, challenging.
748 If you run into this problem, you can use the `--with-nan-emulation'
749 configure option to force the use of this implementation. We can't promise
750 that the compiled binary actually behaves as it should, but since NANs
751 are likely never passed to the libm you have a good chance to be lucky.
753 Likewise, collectd needs to know the layout of doubles in memory, in order
754 to craft uniform network packets over different architectures. For this, it
755 needs to know how to convert doubles into the memory layout used by x86. The
756 configure script tries to figure this out by compiling and running a few
757 small test programs. This is of course not possible when cross-compiling.
758 You can use the `--with-fp-layout' option to tell the configure script which
759 conversion method to assume. Valid arguments are:
761 * `nothing' (12345678 -> 12345678)
762 * `endianflip' (12345678 -> 87654321)
763 * `intswap' (12345678 -> 56781234)
769 For questions, bug reports, development information and basically all other
770 concerns please send an email to collectd's mailing list at
771 <collectd at verplant.org>.
773 For live discussion and more personal contact visit us in IRC, we're in
774 channel #collectd on freenode.
780 Florian octo Forster <octo at verplant.org>,
781 Sebastian tokkee Harl <sh at tokkee.org>,
782 and many contributors (see `AUTHORS').
784 Please send bug reports and patches to the mailing list, see `Contact'