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 Retrieves JSON data via cURL and parses it according to user
51 CPU utilization: Time spent in the system, user, nice, idle, and related
55 CPU frequency (For laptops with speed step or a similar technology)
58 Executes SQL statements on various databases and interprets the returned
62 Mountpoint usage (Basically the values `df(1)' delivers)
65 Disk utilization: Sectors read/written, number of read/write actions,
66 average time an IO-operation took to complete.
69 DNS traffic: Query types, response codes, opcodes and traffic/octets
73 Email statistics: Count, traffic, spam scores and checks.
74 See collectd-email(5).
77 Amount of entropy available to the system.
80 Values gathered by a custom program or script.
84 Count the number of files in directories.
87 Linux file-system based caching framework statistics.
90 Receive multicast traffic from Ganglia instances.
93 Harddisk temperatures using hddtempd.
96 Interface traffic: Number of octets, packets and errors for each
100 Iptables' counters: Number of bytes that were matched by a certain
104 IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) sensors information.
107 IPVS connection statistics (number of connections, octets and packets
108 for each service and destination).
109 See http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/software/index.html.
112 IRQ counters: Frequency in which certain interrupts occur.
115 Integrates a `Java Virtual Machine' (JVM) to execute plugins in Java
116 bytecode. See “Configuring with libjvm” below.
119 System load average over the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes.
122 CPU, disk and network I/O statistics from virtual machines.
125 Motherboard sensors: temperature, fanspeed and voltage information,
129 Query and parse data from a memcache daemon (memcached).
132 Statistics of the memcached distributed caching system.
133 <http://www.danga.com/memcached/>
136 Memory utilization: Memory occupied by running processes, page cache,
137 buffer cache and free.
140 Information provided by serial multimeters, such as the `Metex
144 MySQL server statistics: Commands issued, handlers triggered, thread
145 usage, query cache utilization and traffic/octets sent and received.
148 Very detailed Linux network interface and routing statistics. You can get
149 (detailed) information on interfaces, qdiscs, classes, and, if you can
150 make use of it, filters.
153 Receive values that were collected by other hosts. Large setups will
154 want to collect the data on one dedicated machine, and this is the
155 plugin of choice for that.
158 NFS Procedures: Which NFS command were called how often. Only NFSv2 and
162 Collects statistics from `nginx' (speak: engine X), a HTTP and mail
166 NTP daemon statistics: Local clock drift, offset to peers, etc.
169 Network UPS tools: UPS current, voltage, power, charge, utilisation,
170 temperature, etc. See upsd(8).
172 - onewire (EXPERIMENTAL!)
173 Read onewire sensors using the owcapu library of the owfs project.
174 Please read in collectd.conf(5) why this plugin is experimental.
177 RX and TX of each client in openvpn-status.log (status-version 2).
178 <http://openvpn.net/index.php/documentation/howto.html>
181 Query data from an Oracle database.
184 The perl plugin implements a Perl-interpreter into collectd. You can
185 write your own plugins in Perl and return arbitrary values using this
186 API. See collectd-perl(5).
189 Network latency: Time to reach the default gateway or another given
193 PostgreSQL database statistics: active server connections, transaction
194 numbers, block IO, table row manipulations.
197 PowerDNS name server statistics.
200 Process counts: Number of running, sleeping, zombie, ... processes.
203 Counts various aspects of network protocols such as IP, TCP, UDP, etc.
206 RRDtool caching daemon (RRDcacheD) statistics.
209 System sensors, accessed using lm_sensors: Voltages, temperatures and
213 RX and TX of serial interfaces. Linux only; needs root privileges.
216 Read values from SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) enabled
217 network devices such as switches, routers, thermometers, rack monitoring
218 servers, etc. See collectd-snmp(5).
221 Pages swapped out onto harddisk or whatever is called `swap' by the OS..
224 Parse table-like structured files.
227 Follows (tails) logfiles, parses them by lines and submits matched
231 Bytes and operations read and written on tape devices. Solaris only.
234 Number of TCP connections to specific local and remote ports.
237 TeamSpeak2 server statistics.
240 Plugin to read values from `The Energy Detective' (TED).
243 Linux ACPI thermal zone information.
246 Record in and file size of a Tokyo Cabinet database file.
249 System uptime statistics.
252 Users currently logged in.
255 Virtual memory statistics, e. g. the number of page-ins/-outs or the
256 number of pagefaults.
259 System resources used by Linux VServers.
260 See <http://linux-vserver.org/>.
263 Link quality of wireless cards. Linux only.
266 Bitrate and frequency of music played with XMMS.
268 * Output can be written or send to various destinations by the following
272 Write to comma separated values (CSV) files. This needs lots of
273 diskspace but is extremely portable and can be analysed with almost
274 every program that can analyse anything. Even Microsoft's Excel..
277 Send the data to a remote host to save the data somehow. This is useful
278 for large setups where the data should be saved by a dedicated machine.
281 Of course the values are propagated to plugins written in Perl, too, so
282 you can easily do weird stuff with the plugins we didn't dare think of
283 ;) See collectd-perl(5).
286 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using the RRDtool caching
287 daemon (RRDcacheD) - see rrdcached(1). That daemon provides a general
288 implementation of the caching done by the `rrdtool' plugin.
291 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using librrd. See rrdtool(1).
292 This is likely the most popular destination for such values. Since
293 updates to RRD-files are somewhat expensive this plugin can cache
294 updates to the files and write a bunch of updates at once, which lessens
298 One can query the values from the unixsock plugin whenever they're
299 needed. Please read collectd-unixsock(5) for a description on how that's
302 * Logging is, as everything in collectd, provided by plugins. The following
303 plugins keep up informed about what's going on:
306 Writes logmessages to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
309 Log messages are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
310 See collectd-perl(5).
313 Logs to the standard UNIX logging mechanism, syslog.
315 * Notifications can be handled by the following plugins:
318 Send a desktop notification to a notification daemon, as defined in
319 the Desktop Notification Specification. To actually display the
320 notifications, notification-daemon is required.
321 See http://www.galago-project.org/specs/notification/.
324 Send an E-mail with the notification message to the configured
328 Execute a program or script to handle the notification.
329 See collectd-exec(5).
332 Writes the notification message to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
335 Send the notification to a remote host to handle it somehow.
338 Notifications are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
339 See collectd-perl(5).
341 * Value processing can be controlled using the "filter chain" infrastructure
342 and "matches" and "targets". The following plugins are available:
344 - match_empty_counter
345 Match counter values which are currently zero.
348 Match values by their identifier based on regular expressions.
351 Match values with an invalid timestamp.
354 Select values by their data sources' values.
356 - target_notification
357 Create and dispatch a notification.
360 Replace parts of an identifier using regular expressions.
363 Set (overwrite) entire parts of an identifier.
365 * Miscellaneous plugins:
368 Sets the hostname to an unique identifier. This is meant for setups
369 where each client may migrate to another physical host, possibly going
370 through one or more name changes in the process.
372 * Performance: Since collectd is running as a daemon it doesn't spend much
373 time starting up again and again. With the exception of the exec plugin no
374 processes are forked. Caching in output plugins, such as the rrdtool and
375 network plugins, makes sure your resources are used efficiently. Also,
376 since collectd is programmed multithreaded it benefits from hyperthreading
377 and multicore processors and makes sure that the daemon isn't idle if only
378 one plugins waits for an IO-operation to complete.
380 * Once set up, hardly any maintenance is necessary. Setup is kept as easy
381 as possible and the default values should be okay for most users.
387 * collectd's configuration file can be found at `sysconfdir'/collectd.conf.
388 Run `collectd -h' for a list of builtin defaults. See `collectd.conf(5)'
389 for a list of options and a syntax description.
391 * When the `csv' or `rrdtool' plugins are loaded they'll write the values to
392 files. The usual place for these files is beneath `/var/lib/collectd'.
394 * When using some of the plugins, collectd needs to run as user root, since
395 only root can do certain things, such as craft ICMP packages needed to ping
396 other hosts. collectd should NOT be installed setuid root since it can be
397 used to overwrite valuable files!
399 * Sample scripts to generate graphs reside in `contrib/' in the source
400 package or somewhere near `/usr/share/doc/collectd' in most distributions.
401 Please be aware that those script are meant as a starting point for your
402 own experiments.. Some of them require the `RRDs' Perl module.
403 (`librrds-perl' on Debian) If you have written a more sophisticated
404 solution please share it with us.
406 * The RRAs of the automatically created RRD files depend on the `step'
407 and `heartbeat' settings given. If change these settings you may need to
408 re-create the files, losing all data. Please be aware of that when changing
409 the values and read the rrdtool(1) manpage thoroughly.
412 collectd and chkrootkit
413 -----------------------
415 If you are using the `dns' plugin chkrootkit(1) will report collectd as a
416 packet sniffer ("<iface>: PACKET SNIFFER(/usr/sbin/collectd[<pid>])"). The
417 plugin captures all UDP packets on port 53 to analyze the DNS traffic. In
418 this case, collectd is a legitimate sniffer and the report should be
419 considered to be a false positive. However, you might want to check that
420 this really is collectd and not some other, illegitimate sniffer.
426 To compile collectd from source you will need:
428 * Usual suspects: C compiler, linker, preprocessor, make, ...
430 * A POSIX-threads (pthread) implementation.
431 Since gathering some statistics is slow (network connections, slow devices,
432 etc) the collectd is parallelized. The POSIX threads interface is being
433 used and should be found in various implementations for hopefully all
436 * CoreFoundation.framework and IOKit.framework (optional)
437 For compiling on Darwin in general and the `apple_sensors' plugin in
439 <http://developer.apple.com/corefoundation/>
441 * libclntsh (optional)
442 Used by the `oracle' plugin.
445 If you want to use the `apache', `ascent', `curl' or `nginx' plugin.
446 <http://curl.haxx.se/>
449 Used by the `dbi' plugin to connect to various databases.
450 <http://libdbi.sourceforge.net/>
452 * libesmtp (optional)
453 For the `notify_email' plugin.
454 <http://www.stafford.uklinux.net/libesmtp/>
456 * libganglia (optional)
457 Used by the `gmond' plugin to process data received from Ganglia.
459 * libgcrypt (optional)
460 Used by the `network' plugin for encryption and authentication.
463 If present, the uuid plugin will check for UUID from HAL.
464 <http://hal.freedesktop.org/>
466 * libiptc (optional, if not found a version shipped with this distribution
467 can be used if the Linux kernel headers are available)
468 For querying iptables counters.
469 <http://netfilter.org/>
472 Library that encapsulates the `Java Virtual Machine' (JVM). This library is
473 used by the Java plugin to execute Java bytecode. See “Configuring with
476 * libmemcached (optional)
477 Used by the `memcachec' plugin to connect to a memcache daemon.
479 * libmysqlclient (optional)
480 Unsurprisingly used by the `mysql' plugin.
481 <http://dev.mysql.com/>
483 * libnetlink (optional)
484 Used, obviously, for the `netlink' plugin.
485 <http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Net:Iproute2>
487 * libnetsnmp (optional)
488 For the `snmp' plugin.
489 <http://www.net-snmp.org/>
491 * libnotify (optional)
492 For the `notify_desktop' plugin.
493 <http://www.galago-project.org/>
495 * liboping (optional, if not found a version shipped with this distribution
497 Used by the `ping' plugin to send and receive ICMP packets.
498 <http://verplant.org/liboping/>
500 * libowcapi (optional)
501 Used by the `onewire' plugin to read values from onewire sensors (or the
503 <http://www.owfs.org/>
506 Used to capture packets by the `dns' plugin.
507 <http://www.tcpdump.org/>
510 Obviously used by the `perl' plugin. The library has to be compiled with
511 ithread support (introduced in Perl 5.6.0).
512 <http://www.perl.org/>
515 The PostgreSQL C client library used by the `postgresql' plugin.
516 <http://www.postgresql.org/>
519 Used by the `rrdtool' and `rrdcached' plugins. The latter requires RRDtool
520 client support which was added after version 1.3 of RRDtool. Versions 1.0,
521 1.2 and 1.3 are known to work with the `rrdtool' plugin.
522 <http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/>
524 * librt, libsocket, libkstat, libdevinfo (optional)
525 Various standard Solaris libraries which provide system functions.
526 <http://developers.sun.com/solaris/>
528 * libsensors (optional)
529 To read from `lm_sensors', see the `sensors' plugin.
530 <http://www.lm-sensors.org/>
532 * libstatgrab (optional)
533 Used by various plugins to collect statistics on systems other than Linux
535 <http://www.i-scream.org/libstatgrab/>
537 * libupsclient/nut (optional)
538 For the `nut' plugin which queries nut's `upsd'.
539 <http://networkupstools.org/>
542 Collect statistics from virtual machines.
543 <http://libvirt.org/>
546 Parse XML data. This is needed for the `ascent' and `libvirt' plugins.
547 <http://xmlsoft.org/>
550 <http://www.xmms.org/>
553 Parse JSON data. This is needed for the `curl_json' plugin.
554 <http://www.lloydforge.org/projects/yajl/>
556 Configuring / Compiling / Installing
557 ------------------------------------
559 To configure, build and install collectd with the default settings, run
560 `./configure && make && make install'. For detailed, generic instructions
561 see INSTALL. For a complete list of configure options and their description,
562 run `./configure --help'.
564 By default, the configure script will check for all build dependencies and
565 disable all plugins whose requirements cannot be fulfilled (any other plugin
566 will be enabled). To enable a plugin, install missing dependencies (see
567 section `Prerequisites' above) and rerun `configure'. If you specify the
568 `--enable-<plugin>' configure option, the script will fail if the depen-
569 dencies for the specified plugin are not met. In that case you can force the
570 plugin to be built using the `--enable-<plugin>=force' configure option.
571 This will most likely fail though unless you're working in a very unusual
572 setup and you really know what you're doing. If you specify the
573 `--disable-<plugin>' configure option, the plugin will not be built. If you
574 specify the `--enable-all-plugins' or `--disable-all-plugins' configure
575 options, all plugins will be enabled or disabled respectively by default.
576 Explicitly enabling or disabling a plugin overwrites the default for the
577 specified plugin. These options are meant for package maintainers and should
578 not be used in everyday situations.
580 By default, collectd will be installed into `/opt/collectd'. You can adjust
581 this setting by specifying the `--prefix' configure option - see INSTALL for
582 details. If you pass DESTDIR=<path> to `make install', <path> will be
583 prefixed to all installation directories. This might be useful when creating
584 packages for collectd.
586 Configuring with libjvm
587 -----------------------
589 To determine the location of the required files of a Java installation is not
590 an easy task, because the locations vary with your kernel (Linux, SunOS, …)
591 and with your architecture (x86, SPARC, …) and there is no ‘java-config’
592 script we could use. Configuration of the JVM library is therefore a bit
595 The easiest way to use the `--with-java=$JAVA_HOME' option, where
596 `$JAVA_HOME' is usually something like:
597 /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0.14
599 The configure script will then use find(1) to look for the following files:
605 If found, appropriate CPP-flags and LD-flags are set and the following
606 library checks succeed.
608 If this doesn't work for you, you have the possibility to specify CPP-flags,
609 C-flags and LD-flags for the ‘Java’ plugin by hand, using the following three
610 (environment) variables:
616 For example (shortened for demonstration purposes):
618 ./configure JAVA_CPPFLAGS="-I$JAVA_HOME/include -I$JAVA_HOME/include/linux"
620 Adding "-ljvm" to the JAVA_LDFLAGS is done automatically, you don't have to
626 To compile correctly collectd needs to be able to initialize static
627 variables to NAN (Not A Number). Some C libraries, especially the GNU
628 libc, have a problem with that.
630 Luckily, with GCC it's possible to work around that problem: One can define
631 NAN as being (0.0 / 0.0) and `isnan' as `f != f'. However, to test this
632 ``implementation'' the configure script needs to compile and run a short
633 test program. Obviously running a test program when doing a cross-
634 compilation is, well, challenging.
636 If you run into this problem, you can use the `--with-nan-emulation'
637 configure option to force the use of this implementation. We can't promise
638 that the compiled binary actually behaves as it should, but since NANs
639 are likely never passed to the libm you have a good chance to be lucky.
641 Likewise, collectd needs to know the layout of doubles in memory, in order
642 to craft uniform network packets over different architectures. For this, it
643 needs to know how to convert doubles into the memory layout used by x86. The
644 configure script tries to figure this out by compiling and running a few
645 small test programs. This is of course not possible when cross-compiling.
646 You can use the `--with-fp-layout' option to tell the configure script which
647 conversion method to assume. Valid arguments are:
649 * `nothing' (12345678 -> 12345678)
650 * `endianflip' (12345678 -> 87654321)
651 * `intswap' (12345678 -> 56781234)
657 For questions, bug reports, development information and basically all other
658 concerns please send an email to collectd's mailing list at
659 <collectd at verplant.org>.
661 For live discussion and more personal contact visit us in IRC, we're in
662 channel #collectd on freenode.
668 Florian octo Forster <octo at verplant.org>,
669 Sebastian tokkee Harl <sh at tokkee.org>,
670 and many contributors (see `AUTHORS').
672 Please send bug reports and patches to the mailing list, see `Contact'