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 CPU utilization: Time spent in the system, user, nice, idle, and related
48 CPU frequency (For laptops with speed step or a similar technology)
51 Executes SQL statements on various databases and interprets the returned
55 Mountpoint usage (Basically the values `df(1)' delivers)
58 Disk utilization: Sectors read/written, number of read/write actions,
59 average time an IO-operation took to complete.
62 DNS traffic: Query types, response codes, opcodes and traffic/octets
66 Email statistics: Count, traffic, spam scores and checks.
67 See collectd-email(5).
70 Amount of entropy available to the system.
73 Values gathered by a custom program or script.
77 Count the number of files in directories.
80 Harddisk temperatures using hddtempd.
83 Interface traffic: Number of octets, packets and errors for each
87 Iptables' counters: Number of bytes that were matched by a certain
91 IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) sensors information.
94 IPVS connection statistics (number of connections, octets and packets
95 for each service and destination).
96 See http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/software/index.html.
99 IRQ counters: Frequency in which certain interrupts occur.
102 System load average over the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes.
105 CPU, disk and network I/O statistics from virtual machines.
108 Motherboard sensors: temperature, fanspeed and voltage information,
112 Statistics of the memcached distributed caching system.
113 <http://www.danga.com/memcached/>
116 Memory utilization: Memory occupied by running processes, page cache,
117 buffer cache and free.
120 Information provided by serial multimeters, such as the `Metex
124 MySQL server statistics: Commands issued, handlers triggered, thread
125 usage, query cache utilization and traffic/octets sent and received.
128 Very detailed Linux network interface and routing statistics. You can get
129 (detailed) information on interfaces, qdiscs, classes, and, if you can
130 make use of it, filters.
133 Receive values that were collected by other hosts. Large setups will
134 want to collect the data on one dedicated machine, and this is the
135 plugin of choice for that.
138 NFS Procedures: Which NFS command were called how often. Only NFSv2 and
142 Collects statistics from `nginx' (speak: engine X), a HTTP and mail
146 NTP daemon statistics: Local clock drift, offset to peers, etc.
149 Network UPS tools: UPS current, voltage, power, charge, utilisation,
150 temperature, etc. See upsd(8).
152 - onewire (EXPERIMENTAL!)
153 Read onewire sensors using the owcapu library of the owfs project.
154 Please read in collectd.conf(5) why this plugin is experimental.
157 RX and TX of each client in openvpn-status.log (status-version 2).
158 <http://openvpn.net/index.php/documentation/howto.html>
161 The perl plugin implements a Perl-interpreter into collectd. You can
162 write your own plugins in Perl and return arbitrary values using this
163 API. See collectd-perl(5).
166 Network latency: Time to reach the default gateway or another given
170 PostgreSQL database statistics: active server connections, transaction
171 numbers, block IO, table row manipulations.
174 PowerDNS name server statistics.
177 Process counts: Number of running, sleeping, zombie, ... processes.
180 RRDtool caching daemon (RRDcacheD) statistics.
183 System sensors, accessed using lm_sensors: Voltages, temperatures and
187 RX and TX of serial interfaces. Linux only; needs root privileges.
190 Read values from SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) enabled
191 network devices such as switches, routers, thermometers, rack monitoring
192 servers, etc. See collectd-snmp(5).
195 Pages swapped out onto harddisk or whatever is called `swap' by the OS..
198 Follows (tails) logfiles, parses them by lines and submits matched
202 Bytes and operations read and written on tape devices. Solaris only.
205 Number of TCP connections to specific local and remote ports.
208 TeamSpeak2 server statistics.
211 Linux ACPI thermal zone information.
214 Users currently logged in.
217 Virtual memory statistics, e. g. the number of page-ins/-outs or the
218 number of pagefaults.
221 System resources used by Linux VServers.
222 See <http://linux-vserver.org/>.
225 Link quality of wireless cards. Linux only.
228 Bitrate and frequency of music played with XMMS.
230 * Output can be written or send to various destinations by the following
234 Write to comma separated values (CSV) files. This needs lots of
235 diskspace but is extremely portable and can be analysed with almost
236 every program that can analyse anything. Even Microsoft's Excel..
239 Send the data to a remote host to save the data somehow. This is useful
240 for large setups where the data should be saved by a dedicated machine.
243 Of course the values are propagated to plugins written in Perl, too, so
244 you can easily do weird stuff with the plugins we didn't dare think of
245 ;) See collectd-perl(5).
248 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using the RRDtool caching
249 daemon (RRDcacheD) - see rrdcached(1). That daemon provides a general
250 implementation of the caching done by the `rrdtool' plugin.
253 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using librrd. See rrdtool(1).
254 This is likely the most popular destination for such values. Since
255 updates to RRD-files are somewhat expensive this plugin can cache
256 updates to the files and write a bunch of updates at once, which lessens
260 One can query the values from the unixsock plugin whenever they're
261 needed. Please read collectd-unixsock(5) for a description on how that's
264 * Filtering and rewriting values dispatched to collectd can be done by the
268 Filter and rewrite value lists based on Perl-compatible regular
271 * Logging is, as everything in collectd, provided by plugins. The following
272 plugins keep up informed about what's going on:
275 Writes logmessages to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
278 Log messages are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
279 See collectd-perl(5).
282 Logs to the standard UNIX logging mechanism, syslog.
284 * Notifications can be handled by the following plugins:
287 Send a desktop notification to a notification daemon, as defined in
288 the Desktop Notification Specification. To actually display the
289 notifications, notification-daemon is required.
290 See http://www.galago-project.org/specs/notification/.
293 Send an E-mail with the notification message to the configured
297 Execute a program or script to handle the notification.
298 See collectd-exec(5).
301 Writes the notification message to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
304 Send the notification to a remote host to handle it somehow.
307 Notifications are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
308 See collectd-perl(5).
310 * Miscellaneous plugins:
313 Sets the hostname to an unique identifier. This is meant for setups
314 where each client may migrate to another physical host, possibly going
315 through one or more name changes in the process.
317 * Performance: Since collectd is running as a daemon it doesn't spend much
318 time starting up again and again. With the exception of the exec plugin no
319 processes are forked. Caching in output plugins, such as the rrdtool and
320 network plugins, makes sure your resources are used efficiently. Also,
321 since collectd is programmed multithreaded it benefits from hyperthreading
322 and multicore processors and makes sure that the daemon isn't idle if only
323 one plugins waits for an IO-operation to complete.
325 * Once set up, hardly any maintenance is necessary. Setup is kept as easy
326 as possible and the default values should be okay for most users.
332 * collectd's configuration file can be found at `sysconfdir'/collectd.conf.
333 Run `collectd -h' for a list of builtin defaults. See `collectd.conf(5)'
334 for a list of options and a syntax description.
336 * When the `csv' or `rrdtool' plugins are loaded they'll write the values to
337 files. The usual place for these files is beneath `/var/lib/collectd'.
339 * When using some of the plugins, collectd needs to run as user root, since
340 only root can do certain things, such as craft ICMP packages needed to ping
341 other hosts. collectd should NOT be installed setuid root since it can be
342 used to overwrite valuable files!
344 * Sample scripts to generate graphs reside in `contrib/' in the source
345 package or somewhere near `/usr/share/doc/collectd' in most distributions.
346 Please be aware that those script are meant as a starting point for your
347 own experiments.. Some of them require the `RRDs' Perl module.
348 (`librrds-perl' on Debian) If you have written a more sophisticated
349 solution please share it with us.
351 * The RRAs of the automatically created RRD files depend on the `step'
352 and `heartbeat' settings given. If change these settings you may need to
353 re-create the files, losing all data. Please be aware of that when changing
354 the values and read the rrdtool(1) manpage thoroughly.
357 collectd and chkrootkit
358 -----------------------
360 If you are using the `dns' plugin chkrootkit(1) will report collectd as a
361 packet sniffer ("<iface>: PACKET SNIFFER(/usr/sbin/collectd[<pid>])"). The
362 plugin captures all UDP packets on port 53 to analyze the DNS traffic. In
363 this case, collectd is a legitimate sniffer and the report should be
364 considered to be a false positive. However, you might want to check that
365 this really is collectd and not some other, illegitimate sniffer.
371 To compile collectd from source you will need:
373 * Usual suspects: C compiler, linker, preprocessor, make, ...
375 * A POSIX-threads (pthread) implementation.
376 Since gathering some statistics is slow (network connections, slow devices,
377 etc) the collectd is parallelized. The POSIX threads interface is being
378 used and should be found in various implementations for hopefully all
381 * CoreFoundation.framework and IOKit.framework (optional)
382 For compiling on Darwin in general and the `apple_sensors' plugin in
384 <http://developer.apple.com/corefoundation/>
387 If you want to use the `apache', `ascent', `curl' or `nginx' plugin.
388 <http://curl.haxx.se/>
391 Used by the `dbi' plugin to connect to various databases.
392 <http://libdbi.sourceforge.net/>
394 * libesmtp (optional)
395 For the `notify_email' plugin.
396 <http://www.stafford.uklinux.net/libesmtp/>
399 If present, the uuid plugin will check for UUID from HAL.
400 <http://hal.freedesktop.org/>
402 * libiptc (optional, if not found a version shipped with this distribution
403 can be used if the Linux kernel headers are available)
404 For querying iptables counters.
405 <http://netfilter.org/>
407 * libmysqlclient (optional)
408 Unsurprisingly used by the `mysql' plugin.
409 <http://dev.mysql.com/>
411 * libnetlink (optional)
412 Used, obviously, for the `netlink' plugin.
413 <http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Net:Iproute2>
415 * libnetsnmp (optional)
416 For the `snmp' plugin.
417 <http://www.net-snmp.org/>
419 * libnotify (optional)
420 For the `notify_desktop' plugin.
421 <http://www.galago-project.org/>
423 * liboping (optional, if not found a version shipped with this distribution
425 Used by the `ping' plugin to send and receive ICMP packets.
426 <http://verplant.org/liboping/>
428 * libowcapi (optional)
429 Used by the `onewire' plugin to read values from onewire sensors (or the
431 <http://www.owfs.org/>
434 Used to capture packets by the `dns' plugin.
435 <http://www.tcpdump.org/>
438 Used by the `filter_pcre' plugin.
439 <http://www.pcre.org/>
442 Obviously used by the `perl' plugin. The library has to be compiled with
443 ithread support (introduced in Perl 5.6.0).
444 <http://www.perl.org/>
447 The PostgreSQL C client library used by the `postgresql' plugin.
448 <http://www.postgresql.org/>
451 Used by the `rrdtool' and `rrdcached' plugins. The latter requires RRDtool
452 client support which was added after version 1.3 of RRDtool. Versions 1.0,
453 1.2 and 1.3 are known to work with the `rrdtool' plugin.
454 <http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/>
456 * librt, libsocket, libkstat, libdevinfo (optional)
457 Various standard Solaris libraries which provide system functions.
458 <http://developers.sun.com/solaris/>
460 * libsensors (optional)
461 To read from `lm_sensors', see the `sensors' plugin.
462 <http://www.lm-sensors.org/>
464 * libstatgrab (optional)
465 Used by various plugins to collect statistics on systems other than Linux
467 <http://www.i-scream.org/libstatgrab/>
469 * libupsclient/nut (optional)
470 For the `nut' plugin which queries nut's `upsd'.
471 <http://networkupstools.org/>
474 Collect statistics from virtual machines.
475 <http://libvirt.org/>
478 Parse XML data. This is needed for the `ascent' and `libvirt' plugins.
479 <http://xmlsoft.org/>
482 <http://www.xmms.org/>
485 Configuring / Compiling / Installing
486 ------------------------------------
488 To configure, build and install collectd with the default settings, run
489 `./configure && make && make install'. For detailed, generic instructions
490 see INSTALL. For a complete list of configure options and their description,
491 run `./configure --help'.
493 By default, the configure script will check for all build dependencies and
494 disable all plugins whose requirements cannot be fulfilled (any other plugin
495 will be enabled). To enable a plugin, install missing dependencies (see
496 section `Prerequisites' above) and rerun `configure'. If you specify the
497 `--enable-<plugin>' configure option, the script will fail if the depen-
498 dencies for the specified plugin are not met. If you specify the
499 `--disable-<plugin>' configure option, the plugin will not be built. Both
500 options are meant for package maintainers and should not be used in everyday
503 By default, collectd will be installed into `/opt/collectd'. You can adjust
504 this setting by specifying the `--prefix' configure option - see INSTALL for
505 details. If you pass DESTDIR=<path> to `make install', <path> will be
506 prefixed to all installation directories. This might be useful when creating
507 packages for collectd.
513 To compile correctly collectd needs to be able to initialize static
514 variables to NAN (Not A Number). Some C libraries, especially the GNU
515 libc, have a problem with that.
517 Luckily, with GCC it's possible to work around that problem: One can define
518 NAN as being (0.0 / 0.0) and `isnan' as `f != f'. However, to test this
519 ``implementation'' the configure script needs to compile and run a short
520 test program. Obviously running a test program when doing a cross-
521 compilation is, well, challenging.
523 If you run into this problem, you can use the `--with-nan-emulation'
524 configure option to force the use of this implementation. We can't promise
525 that the compiled binary actually behaves as it should, but since NANs
526 are likely never passed to the libm you have a good chance to be lucky.
532 For questions, bugreports, development information and basically all other
533 concerns please send an email to collectd's mailinglist at
534 <collectd at verplant.org>.
536 For live discussion and more personal contact visit us in IRC, we're in
537 channel #collectd on freenode.
543 Florian octo Forster <octo at verplant.org>,
544 Sebastian tokkee Harl <sh at tokkee.org>,
545 and many contributors (see `AUTHORS').
547 Please send bugreports and patches to the mailinglist, see `Contact' above.