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 Linux file-system based caching framework statistics.
89 Receive multicast traffic from Ganglia instances.
92 Harddisk temperatures using hddtempd.
95 Interface traffic: Number of octets, packets and errors for each
99 Iptables' counters: Number of bytes that were matched by a certain
103 IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) sensors information.
106 IPVS connection statistics (number of connections, octets and packets
107 for each service and destination).
108 See http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/software/index.html.
111 IRQ counters: Frequency in which certain interrupts occur.
114 Integrates a `Java Virtual Machine' (JVM) to execute plugins in Java
115 bytecode. See “Configuring with libjvm” below.
118 System load average over the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes.
121 CPU, disk and network I/O statistics from virtual machines.
124 Motherboard sensors: temperature, fanspeed and voltage information,
128 Query and parse data from a memcache daemon (memcached).
131 Statistics of the memcached distributed caching system.
132 <http://www.danga.com/memcached/>
135 Memory utilization: Memory occupied by running processes, page cache,
136 buffer cache and free.
139 Information provided by serial multimeters, such as the `Metex
143 MySQL server statistics: Commands issued, handlers triggered, thread
144 usage, query cache utilization and traffic/octets sent and received.
147 Very detailed Linux network interface and routing statistics. You can get
148 (detailed) information on interfaces, qdiscs, classes, and, if you can
149 make use of it, filters.
152 Receive values that were collected by other hosts. Large setups will
153 want to collect the data on one dedicated machine, and this is the
154 plugin of choice for that.
157 NFS Procedures: Which NFS command were called how often. Only NFSv2 and
161 Collects statistics from `nginx' (speak: engine X), a HTTP and mail
165 NTP daemon statistics: Local clock drift, offset to peers, etc.
168 Network UPS tools: UPS current, voltage, power, charge, utilisation,
169 temperature, etc. See upsd(8).
171 - onewire (EXPERIMENTAL!)
172 Read onewire sensors using the owcapu library of the owfs project.
173 Please read in collectd.conf(5) why this plugin is experimental.
176 RX and TX of each client in openvpn-status.log (status-version 2).
177 <http://openvpn.net/index.php/documentation/howto.html>
180 Query data from an Oracle database.
183 The perl plugin implements a Perl-interpreter into collectd. You can
184 write your own plugins in Perl and return arbitrary values using this
185 API. See collectd-perl(5).
188 Network latency: Time to reach the default gateway or another given
192 PostgreSQL database statistics: active server connections, transaction
193 numbers, block IO, table row manipulations.
196 PowerDNS name server statistics.
199 Process counts: Number of running, sleeping, zombie, ... processes.
202 Counts various aspects of network protocols such as IP, TCP, UDP, etc.
205 RRDtool caching daemon (RRDcacheD) statistics.
208 System sensors, accessed using lm_sensors: Voltages, temperatures and
212 RX and TX of serial interfaces. Linux only; needs root privileges.
215 Read values from SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) enabled
216 network devices such as switches, routers, thermometers, rack monitoring
217 servers, etc. See collectd-snmp(5).
220 Pages swapped out onto harddisk or whatever is called `swap' by the OS..
223 Parse table-like structured files.
226 Follows (tails) logfiles, parses them by lines and submits matched
230 Bytes and operations read and written on tape devices. Solaris only.
233 Number of TCP connections to specific local and remote ports.
236 TeamSpeak2 server statistics.
239 Plugin to read values from `The Energy Detective' (TED).
242 Linux ACPI thermal zone information.
245 Record in and file size of a Tokyo Cabinet database file.
248 System uptime statistics.
251 Users currently logged in.
254 Virtual memory statistics, e. g. the number of page-ins/-outs or the
255 number of pagefaults.
258 System resources used by Linux VServers.
259 See <http://linux-vserver.org/>.
262 Link quality of wireless cards. Linux only.
265 Send data to a web-server using POST requests.
268 Bitrate and frequency of music played with XMMS.
270 * Output can be written or send to various destinations by the following
274 Write to comma separated values (CSV) files. This needs lots of
275 diskspace but is extremely portable and can be analysed with almost
276 every program that can analyse anything. Even Microsoft's Excel..
279 Send the data to a remote host to save the data somehow. This is useful
280 for large setups where the data should be saved by a dedicated machine.
283 Of course the values are propagated to plugins written in Perl, too, so
284 you can easily do weird stuff with the plugins we didn't dare think of
285 ;) See collectd-perl(5).
288 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using the RRDtool caching
289 daemon (RRDcacheD) - see rrdcached(1). That daemon provides a general
290 implementation of the caching done by the `rrdtool' plugin.
293 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using librrd. See rrdtool(1).
294 This is likely the most popular destination for such values. Since
295 updates to RRD-files are somewhat expensive this plugin can cache
296 updates to the files and write a bunch of updates at once, which lessens
300 One can query the values from the unixsock plugin whenever they're
301 needed. Please read collectd-unixsock(5) for a description on how that's
304 * Logging is, as everything in collectd, provided by plugins. The following
305 plugins keep up informed about what's going on:
308 Writes logmessages to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
311 Log messages are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
312 See collectd-perl(5).
315 Logs to the standard UNIX logging mechanism, syslog.
317 * Notifications can be handled by the following plugins:
320 Send a desktop notification to a notification daemon, as defined in
321 the Desktop Notification Specification. To actually display the
322 notifications, notification-daemon is required.
323 See http://www.galago-project.org/specs/notification/.
326 Send an E-mail with the notification message to the configured
330 Execute a program or script to handle the notification.
331 See collectd-exec(5).
334 Writes the notification message to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
337 Send the notification to a remote host to handle it somehow.
340 Notifications are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
341 See collectd-perl(5).
343 * Value processing can be controlled using the "filter chain" infrastructure
344 and "matches" and "targets". The following plugins are available:
346 - match_empty_counter
347 Match counter values which are currently zero.
350 Match values by their identifier based on regular expressions.
353 Match values with an invalid timestamp.
356 Select values by their data sources' values.
358 - target_notification
359 Create and dispatch a notification.
362 Replace parts of an identifier using regular expressions.
365 Set (overwrite) entire parts of an identifier.
367 * Miscellaneous plugins:
370 Sets the hostname to an unique identifier. This is meant for setups
371 where each client may migrate to another physical host, possibly going
372 through one or more name changes in the process.
374 * Performance: Since collectd is running as a daemon it doesn't spend much
375 time starting up again and again. With the exception of the exec plugin no
376 processes are forked. Caching in output plugins, such as the rrdtool and
377 network plugins, makes sure your resources are used efficiently. Also,
378 since collectd is programmed multithreaded it benefits from hyperthreading
379 and multicore processors and makes sure that the daemon isn't idle if only
380 one plugins waits for an IO-operation to complete.
382 * Once set up, hardly any maintenance is necessary. Setup is kept as easy
383 as possible and the default values should be okay for most users.
389 * collectd's configuration file can be found at `sysconfdir'/collectd.conf.
390 Run `collectd -h' for a list of builtin defaults. See `collectd.conf(5)'
391 for a list of options and a syntax description.
393 * When the `csv' or `rrdtool' plugins are loaded they'll write the values to
394 files. The usual place for these files is beneath `/var/lib/collectd'.
396 * When using some of the plugins, collectd needs to run as user root, since
397 only root can do certain things, such as craft ICMP packages needed to ping
398 other hosts. collectd should NOT be installed setuid root since it can be
399 used to overwrite valuable files!
401 * Sample scripts to generate graphs reside in `contrib/' in the source
402 package or somewhere near `/usr/share/doc/collectd' in most distributions.
403 Please be aware that those script are meant as a starting point for your
404 own experiments.. Some of them require the `RRDs' Perl module.
405 (`librrds-perl' on Debian) If you have written a more sophisticated
406 solution please share it with us.
408 * The RRAs of the automatically created RRD files depend on the `step'
409 and `heartbeat' settings given. If change these settings you may need to
410 re-create the files, losing all data. Please be aware of that when changing
411 the values and read the rrdtool(1) manpage thoroughly.
414 collectd and chkrootkit
415 -----------------------
417 If you are using the `dns' plugin chkrootkit(1) will report collectd as a
418 packet sniffer ("<iface>: PACKET SNIFFER(/usr/sbin/collectd[<pid>])"). The
419 plugin captures all UDP packets on port 53 to analyze the DNS traffic. In
420 this case, collectd is a legitimate sniffer and the report should be
421 considered to be a false positive. However, you might want to check that
422 this really is collectd and not some other, illegitimate sniffer.
428 To compile collectd from source you will need:
430 * Usual suspects: C compiler, linker, preprocessor, make, ...
432 * A POSIX-threads (pthread) implementation.
433 Since gathering some statistics is slow (network connections, slow devices,
434 etc) the collectd is parallelized. The POSIX threads interface is being
435 used and should be found in various implementations for hopefully all
438 * CoreFoundation.framework and IOKit.framework (optional)
439 For compiling on Darwin in general and the `apple_sensors' plugin in
441 <http://developer.apple.com/corefoundation/>
443 * libclntsh (optional)
444 Used by the `oracle' plugin.
447 If you want to use the `apache', `ascent', `curl', `nginx', or `write_http'
449 <http://curl.haxx.se/>
452 Used by the `dbi' plugin to connect to various databases.
453 <http://libdbi.sourceforge.net/>
455 * libesmtp (optional)
456 For the `notify_email' plugin.
457 <http://www.stafford.uklinux.net/libesmtp/>
459 * libganglia (optional)
460 Used by the `gmond' plugin to process data received from Ganglia.
462 * libgcrypt (optional)
463 Used by the `network' plugin for encryption and authentication.
466 If present, the uuid plugin will check for UUID from HAL.
467 <http://hal.freedesktop.org/>
469 * libiptc (optional, if not found a version shipped with this distribution
470 can be used if the Linux kernel headers are available)
471 For querying iptables counters.
472 <http://netfilter.org/>
475 Library that encapsulates the `Java Virtual Machine' (JVM). This library is
476 used by the Java plugin to execute Java bytecode. See “Configuring with
479 * libmemcached (optional)
480 Used by the `memcachec' plugin to connect to a memcache daemon.
482 * libmysqlclient (optional)
483 Unsurprisingly used by the `mysql' plugin.
484 <http://dev.mysql.com/>
486 * libnetlink (optional)
487 Used, obviously, for the `netlink' plugin.
488 <http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Net:Iproute2>
490 * libnetsnmp (optional)
491 For the `snmp' plugin.
492 <http://www.net-snmp.org/>
494 * libnotify (optional)
495 For the `notify_desktop' plugin.
496 <http://www.galago-project.org/>
498 * liboping (optional, if not found a version shipped with this distribution
500 Used by the `ping' plugin to send and receive ICMP packets.
501 <http://verplant.org/liboping/>
503 * libowcapi (optional)
504 Used by the `onewire' plugin to read values from onewire sensors (or the
506 <http://www.owfs.org/>
509 Used to capture packets by the `dns' plugin.
510 <http://www.tcpdump.org/>
513 Obviously used by the `perl' plugin. The library has to be compiled with
514 ithread support (introduced in Perl 5.6.0).
515 <http://www.perl.org/>
518 The PostgreSQL C client library used by the `postgresql' plugin.
519 <http://www.postgresql.org/>
522 Used by the `rrdtool' and `rrdcached' plugins. The latter requires RRDtool
523 client support which was added after version 1.3 of RRDtool. Versions 1.0,
524 1.2 and 1.3 are known to work with the `rrdtool' plugin.
525 <http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/>
527 * librt, libsocket, libkstat, libdevinfo (optional)
528 Various standard Solaris libraries which provide system functions.
529 <http://developers.sun.com/solaris/>
531 * libsensors (optional)
532 To read from `lm_sensors', see the `sensors' plugin.
533 <http://www.lm-sensors.org/>
535 * libstatgrab (optional)
536 Used by various plugins to collect statistics on systems other than Linux
538 <http://www.i-scream.org/libstatgrab/>
540 * libupsclient/nut (optional)
541 For the `nut' plugin which queries nut's `upsd'.
542 <http://networkupstools.org/>
545 Collect statistics from virtual machines.
546 <http://libvirt.org/>
549 Parse XML data. This is needed for the `ascent' and `libvirt' plugins.
550 <http://xmlsoft.org/>
553 <http://www.xmms.org/>
556 Parse JSON data. This is needed for the `couchdb' plugin.
557 <http://www.lloydforge.org/projects/yajl/>
559 Configuring / Compiling / Installing
560 ------------------------------------
562 To configure, build and install collectd with the default settings, run
563 `./configure && make && make install'. For detailed, generic instructions
564 see INSTALL. For a complete list of configure options and their description,
565 run `./configure --help'.
567 By default, the configure script will check for all build dependencies and
568 disable all plugins whose requirements cannot be fulfilled (any other plugin
569 will be enabled). To enable a plugin, install missing dependencies (see
570 section `Prerequisites' above) and rerun `configure'. If you specify the
571 `--enable-<plugin>' configure option, the script will fail if the depen-
572 dencies for the specified plugin are not met. In that case you can force the
573 plugin to be built using the `--enable-<plugin>=force' configure option.
574 This will most likely fail though unless you're working in a very unusual
575 setup and you really know what you're doing. If you specify the
576 `--disable-<plugin>' configure option, the plugin will not be built. If you
577 specify the `--enable-all-plugins' or `--disable-all-plugins' configure
578 options, all plugins will be enabled or disabled respectively by default.
579 Explicitly enabling or disabling a plugin overwrites the default for the
580 specified plugin. These options are meant for package maintainers and should
581 not be used in everyday situations.
583 By default, collectd will be installed into `/opt/collectd'. You can adjust
584 this setting by specifying the `--prefix' configure option - see INSTALL for
585 details. If you pass DESTDIR=<path> to `make install', <path> will be
586 prefixed to all installation directories. This might be useful when creating
587 packages for collectd.
589 Configuring with libjvm
590 -----------------------
592 To determine the location of the required files of a Java installation is not
593 an easy task, because the locations vary with your kernel (Linux, SunOS, …)
594 and with your architecture (x86, SPARC, …) and there is no ‘java-config’
595 script we could use. Configuration of the JVM library is therefore a bit
598 The easiest way to use the `--with-java=$JAVA_HOME' option, where
599 `$JAVA_HOME' is usually something like:
600 /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0.14
602 The configure script will then use find(1) to look for the following files:
608 If found, appropriate CPP-flags and LD-flags are set and the following
609 library checks succeed.
611 If this doesn't work for you, you have the possibility to specify CPP-flags,
612 C-flags and LD-flags for the ‘Java’ plugin by hand, using the following three
613 (environment) variables:
619 For example (shortened for demonstration purposes):
621 ./configure JAVA_CPPFLAGS="-I$JAVA_HOME/include -I$JAVA_HOME/include/linux"
623 Adding "-ljvm" to the JAVA_LDFLAGS is done automatically, you don't have to
629 To compile correctly collectd needs to be able to initialize static
630 variables to NAN (Not A Number). Some C libraries, especially the GNU
631 libc, have a problem with that.
633 Luckily, with GCC it's possible to work around that problem: One can define
634 NAN as being (0.0 / 0.0) and `isnan' as `f != f'. However, to test this
635 ``implementation'' the configure script needs to compile and run a short
636 test program. Obviously running a test program when doing a cross-
637 compilation is, well, challenging.
639 If you run into this problem, you can use the `--with-nan-emulation'
640 configure option to force the use of this implementation. We can't promise
641 that the compiled binary actually behaves as it should, but since NANs
642 are likely never passed to the libm you have a good chance to be lucky.
644 Likewise, collectd needs to know the layout of doubles in memory, in order
645 to craft uniform network packets over different architectures. For this, it
646 needs to know how to convert doubles into the memory layout used by x86. The
647 configure script tries to figure this out by compiling and running a few
648 small test programs. This is of course not possible when cross-compiling.
649 You can use the `--with-fp-layout' option to tell the configure script which
650 conversion method to assume. Valid arguments are:
652 * `nothing' (12345678 -> 12345678)
653 * `endianflip' (12345678 -> 87654321)
654 * `intswap' (12345678 -> 56781234)
660 For questions, bug reports, development information and basically all other
661 concerns please send an email to collectd's mailing list at
662 <collectd at verplant.org>.
664 For live discussion and more personal contact visit us in IRC, we're in
665 channel #collectd on freenode.
671 Florian octo Forster <octo at verplant.org>,
672 Sebastian tokkee Harl <sh at tokkee.org>,
673 and many contributors (see `AUTHORS').
675 Please send bug reports and patches to the mailing list, see `Contact'