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 CPU utilization: Time spent in the system, user, nice, idle, and related
41 CPU frequency (For laptops with speed step or a similar technology)
44 Mountpoint usage (Basically the values `df(1)' delivers)
47 Disk utilization: Sectors read/written, number of read/write actions,
48 average time an IO-operation took to complete.
51 DNS traffic: Query types, response codes, opcodes and traffic/octets
55 Email statistics: Count, traffic, spam scores and checks.
56 See collectd-email(5).
59 Amount of entropy available to the system.
62 Values gathered by a custom program or script.
66 Harddisk temperatures using hddtempd.
69 Interface traffic: Number of octets, packets and errors for each
73 Iptables' counters: Number of bytes that were matched by a certain
77 IPVS connection statistics (number of connections, octets and packets
78 for each service and destination).
79 See http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/software/index.html.
82 IRQ counters: Frequency in which certain interrupts occur.
85 System load average over the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes.
88 CPU, disk and network I/O statistics from virtual machines.
91 Motherboard sensors: temperature, fanspeed and voltage information,
95 Statistics of the memcached distributed caching system.
96 <http://www.danga.com/memcached/>
99 Memory utilization: Memory occupied by running processes, page cache,
100 buffer cache and free.
103 Information provided by serial multimeters, such as the `Metex
107 MySQL server statistics: Commands issued, handlers triggered, thread
108 usage, query cache utilization and traffic/octets sent and received.
111 Very detailed Linux network interface and routing statistics. You can get
112 (detailed) information on interfaces, qdiscs, classes, and, if you can
113 make use of it, filters.
116 Receive values that were collected by other hosts. Large setups will
117 want to collect the data on one dedicated machine, and this is the
118 plugin of choice for that.
121 NFS Procedures: Which NFS command were called how often. Only NFSv2 and
125 Collects statistics from `nginx' (speak: engine X), a HTTP and mail
129 NTP daemon statistics: Local clock drift, offset to peers, etc.
132 Network UPS tools: UPS current, voltage, power, charge, utilisation,
133 temperature, etc. See upsd(8).
136 The perl plugin implements a Perl-interpreter into collectd. You can
137 write your own plugins in Perl and return arbitrary values using this
138 API. See collectd-perl(5).
141 Network latency: Time to reach the default gateway or another given
145 Process counts: Number of running, sleeping, zombie, ... processes.
148 System sensors, accessed using lm_sensors: Voltages, temperatures and
152 RX and TX of serial interfaces. Linux only; needs root privileges.
155 Read values from SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) enabled
156 network devices such as switches, routers, thermometers, rack monitoring
157 servers, etc. See collectd-snmp(5).
160 Pages swapped out onto harddisk or whatever is called `swap' by the OS..
163 Follows (tails) logfiles, parses them by lines and submits matched
167 Bytes and operations read and written on tape devices. Solaris only.
170 Number of TCP connections to specific local and remote ports.
173 Users currently logged in.
176 Virtual memory statistics, e. g. the number of page-ins/-outs or the
177 number of pagefaults.
180 System resources used by Linux VServers.
181 See <http://linux-vserver.org/>.
184 Link quality of wireless cards. Linux only.
187 Bitrate and frequency of music played with XMMS.
189 * Output can be written or send to various destinations by the following
193 Write to comma separated values (CSV) files. This needs lots of
194 diskspace but is extremely portable and can be analysed with almost
195 every program that can analyse anything. Even Microsoft's Excel..
198 Send the data to a remote host to save the data somehow. This is useful
199 for large setups where the data should be saved by a dedicated machine.
202 Of course the values are propagated to plugins written in Perl, too, so
203 you can easily do weird stuff with the plugins we didn't dare think of
204 ;) See collectd-perl(5).
207 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using librrd. See rrdtool(1).
208 This is likely the most popular destination for such values. Since
209 updates to RRD-files are somewhat expensive this plugin can cache
210 updates to the files and write a bunch of updates at once, which lessens
214 One can query the values from the unixsock plugin whenever they're
215 needed. Please read collectd-unixsock(5) for a description on how that's
218 * Logging is, as everything in collectd, provided by plugins. The following
219 plugins keep up informed about what's going on:
222 Writes logmessages to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
225 Log messages are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
226 See collectd-perl(5).
229 Logs to the standard UNIX logging mechanism, syslog.
231 * Notifications can be handled by the following plugins:
234 Send a desktop notification to a notification daemon, as defined in
235 the Desktop Notification Specification. To actually display the
236 notifications, notification-daemon is required.
237 See http://www.galago-project.org/specs/notification/.
240 Send an E-mail with the notification message to the configured
244 Execute a program or script to handle the notification.
245 See collectd-exec(5).
248 Writes the notification message to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
251 Send the notification to a remote host to handle it somehow.
254 Notifications are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
255 See collectd-perl(5).
257 * Miscellaneous plugins:
260 Sets the hostname to an unique identifier. This is meant for setups
261 where each client may migrate to another physical host, possibly going
262 through one or more name changes in the process.
264 * Performance: Since collectd is running as a daemon it doesn't spend much
265 time starting up again and again. With the exception of the exec plugin no
266 processes are forked. Caching in output plugins, such as the rrdtool and
267 network plugins, makes sure your resources are used efficiently. Also,
268 since collectd is programmed multithreaded it benefits from hyperthreading
269 and multicore processors and makes sure that the daemon isn't idle if only
270 one plugins waits for an IO-operation to complete.
272 * Once set up, hardly any maintenance is necessary. Setup is kept as easy
273 as possible and the default values should be okay for most users.
279 * collectd's configuration file can be found at `sysconfdir'/collectd.conf.
280 Run `collectd -h' for a list of builtin defaults. See `collectd.conf(5)'
281 for a list of options and a syntax description.
283 * When the `csv' or `rrdtool' plugins are loaded they'll write the values to
284 files. The usual place for these files is beneath `/var/lib/collectd'.
286 * When using some of the plugins, collectd needs to run as user root, since
287 only root can do certain things, such as craft ICMP packages needed to ping
288 other hosts. collectd should NOT be installed setuid root since it can be
289 used to overwrite valuable files!
291 * Sample scripts to generate graphs reside in `contrib/' in the source
292 package or somewhere near `/usr/share/doc/collectd' in most distributions.
293 Please be aware that those script are meant as a starting point for your
294 own experiments.. Some of them require the `RRDs' Perl module.
295 (`librrds-perl' on Debian) If you have written a more sophisticated
296 solution please share it with us.
298 * The RRAs of the automatically created RRD files depend on the `step'
299 and `heartbeat' settings given. If change these settings you may need to
300 re-create the files, losing all data. Please be aware of that when changing
301 the values and read the rrdtool(1) manpage thoroughly.
304 collectd and chkrootkit
305 -----------------------
307 If you are using the `dns' plugin chkrootkit(1) will report collectd as a
308 packet sniffer ("<iface>: PACKET SNIFFER(/usr/sbin/collectd[<pid>])"). The
309 plugin captures all UDP packets on port 53 to analyze the DNS traffic. In
310 this case, collectd is a legitimate sniffer and the report should be
311 considered to be a false positive. However, you might want to check that
312 this really is collectd and not some other, illegitimate sniffer.
318 To compile collectd from source you will need:
320 * Usual suspects: C compiler, linker, preprocessor, make, ...
322 * A POSIX-threads (pthread) implementation.
323 Since gathering some statistics is slow (network connections, slow devices,
324 etc) the collectd is parallelized. The POSIX threads interface is being
325 used and should be found in various implementations for hopefully all
328 * CoreFoundation.framework and IOKit.framework (optional)
329 For compiling on Darwin in general and the `apple_sensors' plugin in
333 If you want to use the `apache', `ascent', or `nginx' plugin.
335 * libesmtp (optional)
336 For the `notify_email' plugin.
339 If present, the uuid plugin will check for UUID from HAL.
342 For querying iptables counters.
344 * libmysqlclient (optional)
345 Unsurprisingly used by the `mysql' plugin.
347 * libnetlink (optional)
348 Used, obviously, for the `netlink' plugin.
350 * libnetsnmp (optional)
351 For the `snmp' plugin.
353 * libnotify (optional)
354 For the `notify_desktop' plugin.
356 * liboping (optional, if not found a version shipped with this distribution
358 Used by the `ping' plugin to send and receive ICMP packets.
361 Used to capture packets by the `dns' plugin.
364 Obviously used by the `perl' plugin. The library has to be compiled with
365 ithread support (introduced in Perl 5.6.0).
367 * librrd (optional; headers and library; rrdtool 1.0 and 1.2 both work fine)
368 If built without `librrd' the resulting binary will be `client only', i.e.
369 will send its values via multicast and not create any RRD files itself.
370 Alternatively you can chose to write CSV-files (Comma Separated Values)
373 * librt, libsocket, libkstat, libdevinfo (optional)
374 Various standard Solaris libraries which provide system functions.
376 * libsensors (optional)
377 To read from `lm_sensors', see the `sensors' plugin.
379 * libstatgrab (optional) may be used to collect statistics on systems other
380 than Linux and/or Solaris. Note that CPU- and disk-statistics, while being
381 provided by this library, are not supported in collectd right now..
382 <http://www.i-scream.org/libstatgrab/>
384 * libupsclient/nut (optional)
385 For the `nut' plugin which queries nut's `upsd'.
388 Collect statistics from virtual machines.
391 Parse XML data. This is needed for the `ascent' and `libvirt' plugins.
396 Configuring / Compiling / Installing
397 ------------------------------------
399 To configure, build and install collectd with the default settings, run
400 `./configure && make && make install'. For detailed, generic instructions
401 see INSTALL. For a complete list of configure options and their description,
402 run `./configure --help'.
404 By default, the configure script will check for all build dependencies and
405 disable all plugins whose requirements cannot be fulfilled (any other plugin
406 will be enabled). To enable a plugin, install missing dependencies (see
407 section `Prerequisites' above) and rerun `configure'. If you specify the
408 `--enable-<plugin>' configure option, you can force the plugin to be built.
409 This will most likely fail though unless you're working in a very unusual
410 setup and you really know what you're doing.
412 By default, collectd will be installed into `/opt/collectd'. You can adjust
413 this setting by specifying the `--prefix' configure option - see INSTALL for
414 details. If you pass DESTDIR=<path> to `make install', <path> will be
415 prefixed to all installation directories. This might be useful when creating
416 packages for collectd.
422 To compile correctly collectd needs to be able to initialize static
423 variables to NAN (Not A Number). Some C libraries, especially the GNU
424 libc, have a problem with that.
426 Luckily, with GCC it's possible to work around that problem: One can define
427 NAN as being (0.0 / 0.0) and `isnan' as `f != f'. However, to test this
428 ``implementation'' the configure script needs to compile and run a short
429 test program. Obviously running a test program when doing a cross-
430 compilation is, well, challenging.
432 If you run into this problem, you can use the `--with-nan-emulation'
433 configure option to force the use of this implementation. We can't promise
434 that the compiled binary actually behaves as it should, but since NANs
435 are likely never passed to the libm you have a good chance to be lucky.
441 For questions, bugreports, development information and basically all other
442 concerns please send an email to collectd's mailinglist at
443 <collectd at verplant.org>.
445 For live discussion and more personal contact visit us in IRC, we're in
446 channel #collectd on freenode.
452 Florian octo Forster <octo at verplant.org>,
453 Sebastian tokkee Harl <sh at tokkee.org>,
454 and many contributors (see `AUTHORS').
456 Please send bugreports and patches to the mailinglist, see `Contact' above.