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 Detailed CPU statistics of the “Logical Partitions” virtualization
130 technique built into IBM's POWER processors.
133 CPU, disk and network I/O statistics from virtual machines.
136 Queries very detailed usage statistics from wireless LAN adapters and
137 interfaces that use the Atheros chipset and the MadWifi driver.
140 Motherboard sensors: temperature, fanspeed and voltage information,
144 Linux software-RAID device information (number of active, failed, spare
148 Query and parse data from a memcache daemon (memcached).
151 Statistics of the memcached distributed caching system.
152 <http://www.danga.com/memcached/>
155 Memory utilization: Memory occupied by running processes, page cache,
156 buffer cache and free.
159 Reads values from Modbus/TCP enabled devices. Supports reading values
160 from multiple "slaves" so gateway devices can be used.
163 Information provided by serial multimeters, such as the `Metex
167 MySQL server statistics: Commands issued, handlers triggered, thread
168 usage, query cache utilization and traffic/octets sent and received.
171 Plugin to query performance values from a NetApp storage system using the
172 “Manage ONTAP” SDK provided by NetApp.
175 Very detailed Linux network interface and routing statistics. You can get
176 (detailed) information on interfaces, qdiscs, classes, and, if you can
177 make use of it, filters.
180 Receive values that were collected by other hosts. Large setups will
181 want to collect the data on one dedicated machine, and this is the
182 plugin of choice for that.
185 NFS Procedures: Which NFS command were called how often. Only NFSv2 and
189 Collects statistics from `nginx' (speak: engine X), a HTTP and mail
193 NTP daemon statistics: Local clock drift, offset to peers, etc.
196 Network UPS tools: UPS current, voltage, power, charge, utilisation,
197 temperature, etc. See upsd(8).
200 Information about Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA).
203 Queries routing information from the “Optimized Link State Routing”
206 - onewire (EXPERIMENTAL!)
207 Read onewire sensors using the owcapu library of the owfs project.
208 Please read in collectd.conf(5) why this plugin is experimental.
211 RX and TX of each client in openvpn-status.log (status-version 2).
212 <http://openvpn.net/index.php/documentation/howto.html>
215 Query data from an Oracle database.
218 The perl plugin implements a Perl-interpreter into collectd. You can
219 write your own plugins in Perl and return arbitrary values using this
220 API. See collectd-perl(5).
223 Receive and dispatch timing values from Pinba, a profiling extension for
227 Network latency: Time to reach the default gateway or another given
231 PostgreSQL database statistics: active server connections, transaction
232 numbers, block IO, table row manipulations.
235 PowerDNS name server statistics.
238 Process counts: Number of running, sleeping, zombie, ... processes.
241 Counts various aspects of network protocols such as IP, TCP, UDP, etc.
244 The python plugin implements a Python interpreter into collectd. This
245 makes it possible to write plugins in Python which are executed by
246 collectd without the need to start a heavy interpreter every interval.
247 See collectd-python(5) for details.
250 The redis plugin gathers information from a redis server, including:
251 uptime, used memory, total connections etc.
254 Query interface and wireless registration statistics from RouterOS.
257 RRDtool caching daemon (RRDcacheD) statistics.
260 System sensors, accessed using lm_sensors: Voltages, temperatures and
264 RX and TX of serial interfaces. Linux only; needs root privileges.
267 Read values from SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) enabled
268 network devices such as switches, routers, thermometers, rack monitoring
269 servers, etc. See collectd-snmp(5).
272 Pages swapped out onto harddisk or whatever is called `swap' by the OS..
275 Parse table-like structured files.
278 Follows (tails) logfiles, parses them by lines and submits matched
282 Bytes and operations read and written on tape devices. Solaris only.
285 Number of TCP connections to specific local and remote ports.
288 TeamSpeak2 server statistics.
291 Plugin to read values from `The Energy Detective' (TED).
294 Linux ACPI thermal zone information.
297 Reads the number of records and file size from a running Tokyo Tyrant
301 System uptime statistics.
304 Users currently logged in.
307 Various statistics from Varnish, an HTTP accelerator.
310 Virtual memory statistics, e. g. the number of page-ins/-outs or the
311 number of pagefaults.
314 System resources used by Linux VServers.
315 See <http://linux-vserver.org/>.
318 Link quality of wireless cards. Linux only.
321 Bitrate and frequency of music played with XMMS.
324 Statistics for ZFS' “Adaptive Replacement Cache” (ARC).
326 * Output can be written or sent to various destinations by the following
330 Sends JSON-encoded data to an Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP)
331 server, such as RabbitMQ.
334 Write to comma separated values (CSV) files. This needs lots of
335 diskspace but is extremely portable and can be analysed with almost
336 every program that can analyse anything. Even Microsoft's Excel..
339 Send the data to a remote host to save the data somehow. This is useful
340 for large setups where the data should be saved by a dedicated machine.
343 Of course the values are propagated to plugins written in Perl, too, so
344 you can easily do weird stuff with the plugins we didn't dare think of
345 ;) See collectd-perl(5).
348 It's possible to implement write plugins in Python using the python
349 plugin. See collectd-python(5) for details.
352 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using the RRDtool caching
353 daemon (RRDcacheD) - see rrdcached(1). That daemon provides a general
354 implementation of the caching done by the `rrdtool' plugin.
357 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using librrd. See rrdtool(1).
358 This is likely the most popular destination for such values. Since
359 updates to RRD-files are somewhat expensive this plugin can cache
360 updates to the files and write a bunch of updates at once, which lessens
364 One can query the values from the unixsock plugin whenever they're
365 needed. Please read collectd-unixsock(5) for a description on how that's
369 Sends data to Carbon, the storage layer of Graphite.
372 Sends the values collected by collectd to a web-server using HTTP POST
373 requests. The transmitted data is either in a form understood by the
374 Exec plugin or formatted in JSON.
377 Sends the values to a Redis key-value database server.
379 * Logging is, as everything in collectd, provided by plugins. The following
380 plugins keep up informed about what's going on:
383 Writes logmessages to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
386 Log messages are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
387 See collectd-perl(5).
390 It's possible to implement log plugins in Python using the python plugin.
391 See collectd-python(5) for details.
394 Logs to the standard UNIX logging mechanism, syslog.
396 * Notifications can be handled by the following plugins:
399 Send a desktop notification to a notification daemon, as defined in
400 the Desktop Notification Specification. To actually display the
401 notifications, notification-daemon is required.
402 See http://www.galago-project.org/specs/notification/.
405 Send an E-mail with the notification message to the configured
409 Execute a program or script to handle the notification.
410 See collectd-exec(5).
413 Writes the notification message to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
416 Send the notification to a remote host to handle it somehow.
419 Notifications are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
420 See collectd-perl(5).
423 It's possible to implement notification plugins in Python using the
424 python plugin. See collectd-python(5) for details.
426 * Value processing can be controlled using the "filter chain" infrastructure
427 and "matches" and "targets". The following plugins are available:
429 - match_empty_counter
430 Match counter values which are currently zero.
433 Match values using a hash function of the hostname.
436 Match values by their identifier based on regular expressions.
439 Match values with an invalid timestamp.
442 Select values by their data sources' values.
444 - target_notification
445 Create and dispatch a notification.
448 Replace parts of an identifier using regular expressions.
451 Scale (multiply) values by an arbitrary value.
454 Set (overwrite) entire parts of an identifier.
456 * Miscellaneous plugins:
459 Checks values against configured thresholds and creates notifications if
460 values are out of bounds. See collectd-threshold(5) for details.
463 Sets the hostname to an unique identifier. This is meant for setups
464 where each client may migrate to another physical host, possibly going
465 through one or more name changes in the process.
467 * Performance: Since collectd is running as a daemon it doesn't spend much
468 time starting up again and again. With the exception of the exec plugin no
469 processes are forked. Caching in output plugins, such as the rrdtool and
470 network plugins, makes sure your resources are used efficiently. Also,
471 since collectd is programmed multithreaded it benefits from hyperthreading
472 and multicore processors and makes sure that the daemon isn't idle if only
473 one plugin waits for an IO-operation to complete.
475 * Once set up, hardly any maintenance is necessary. Setup is kept as easy
476 as possible and the default values should be okay for most users.
482 * collectd's configuration file can be found at `sysconfdir'/collectd.conf.
483 Run `collectd -h' for a list of builtin defaults. See `collectd.conf(5)'
484 for a list of options and a syntax description.
486 * When the `csv' or `rrdtool' plugins are loaded they'll write the values to
487 files. The usual place for these files is beneath `/var/lib/collectd'.
489 * When using some of the plugins, collectd needs to run as user root, since
490 only root can do certain things, such as craft ICMP packages needed to ping
491 other hosts. collectd should NOT be installed setuid root since it can be
492 used to overwrite valuable files!
494 * Sample scripts to generate graphs reside in `contrib/' in the source
495 package or somewhere near `/usr/share/doc/collectd' in most distributions.
496 Please be aware that those script are meant as a starting point for your
497 own experiments.. Some of them require the `RRDs' Perl module.
498 (`librrds-perl' on Debian) If you have written a more sophisticated
499 solution please share it with us.
501 * The RRAs of the automatically created RRD files depend on the `step'
502 and `heartbeat' settings given. If change these settings you may need to
503 re-create the files, losing all data. Please be aware of that when changing
504 the values and read the rrdtool(1) manpage thoroughly.
507 collectd and chkrootkit
508 -----------------------
510 If you are using the `dns' plugin chkrootkit(1) will report collectd as a
511 packet sniffer ("<iface>: PACKET SNIFFER(/usr/sbin/collectd[<pid>])"). The
512 plugin captures all UDP packets on port 53 to analyze the DNS traffic. In
513 this case, collectd is a legitimate sniffer and the report should be
514 considered to be a false positive. However, you might want to check that
515 this really is collectd and not some other, illegitimate sniffer.
521 To compile collectd from source you will need:
523 * Usual suspects: C compiler, linker, preprocessor, make, ...
525 * A POSIX-threads (pthread) implementation.
526 Since gathering some statistics is slow (network connections, slow devices,
527 etc) the collectd is parallelized. The POSIX threads interface is being
528 used and should be found in various implementations for hopefully all
531 * CoreFoundation.framework and IOKit.framework (optional)
532 For compiling on Darwin in general and the `apple_sensors' plugin in
534 <http://developer.apple.com/corefoundation/>
536 * libclntsh (optional)
537 Used by the `oracle' plugin.
539 * libcredis (optional)
540 Used by the redis plugin. Please note that you require a 0.2.2 version
541 or higher. <http://code.google.com/p/credis/>
544 If you want to use the `apache', `ascent', `curl', `nginx', or `write_http'
546 <http://curl.haxx.se/>
549 Used by the `dbi' plugin to connect to various databases.
550 <http://libdbi.sourceforge.net/>
552 * libesmtp (optional)
553 For the `notify_email' plugin.
554 <http://www.stafford.uklinux.net/libesmtp/>
556 * libganglia (optional)
557 Used by the `gmond' plugin to process data received from Ganglia.
558 <http://ganglia.info/>
560 * libgcrypt (optional)
561 Used by the `network' plugin for encryption and authentication.
562 <http://www.gnupg.org/>
565 If present, the uuid plugin will check for UUID from HAL.
566 <http://hal.freedesktop.org/>
569 For querying iptables counters.
570 <http://netfilter.org/>
572 If not found on the system, a version shipped with this distribution can
573 be used. It requires some Linux headers in /usr/include/linux. You can
574 force the build system to use the shipped version by specifying
575 --with-libiptc=shipped
576 when running the configure script.
579 Library that encapsulates the `Java Virtual Machine' (JVM). This library is
580 used by the Java plugin to execute Java bytecode. See “Configuring with
582 <http://openjdk.java.net/> (and others)
584 * libmemcached (optional)
585 Used by the `memcachec' plugin to connect to a memcache daemon.
586 <http://tangent.org/552/libmemcached.html>
588 * libmodbus (optional)
589 Used by the “modbus” plugin to communicate with Modbus/TCP devices. The
590 “modbus” plugin works with version 2.0.3 of the library – due to frequent
591 API changes other versions may or may not compile cleanly.
592 <http://www.libmodbus.org/>
594 * libmysqlclient (optional)
595 Unsurprisingly used by the `mysql' plugin.
596 <http://dev.mysql.com/>
598 * libnetapp (optional)
599 Required for the “netapp” plugin.
600 This library is part of the “Manage ONTAP SDK” published by NetApp.
602 * libnetlink (optional)
603 Used, obviously, for the `netlink' plugin.
604 <http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Net:Iproute2>
606 * libnetsnmp (optional)
607 For the `snmp' plugin.
608 <http://www.net-snmp.org/>
610 * libnotify (optional)
611 For the `notify_desktop' plugin.
612 <http://www.galago-project.org/>
614 * liboping (optional)
615 Used by the `ping' plugin to send and receive ICMP packets.
616 <http://verplant.org/liboping/>
618 * libowcapi (optional)
619 Used by the `onewire' plugin to read values from onewire sensors (or the
621 <http://www.owfs.org/>
624 Used to capture packets by the `dns' plugin.
625 <http://www.tcpdump.org/>
627 * libperfstat (optional)
628 Used by various plugins to gather statistics under AIX.
631 Obviously used by the `perl' plugin. The library has to be compiled with
632 ithread support (introduced in Perl 5.6.0).
633 <http://www.perl.org/>
636 The PostgreSQL C client library used by the `postgresql' plugin.
637 <http://www.postgresql.org/>
639 * libprotobuf-c, protoc-c (optional)
640 Used by the `pinba' plugin to generate a parser for the network packets
641 sent by the Pinba PHP extension.
642 <http://code.google.com/p/protobuf-c/>
644 * libpython (optional)
645 Used by the `python' plugin. Currently, Python 2.3 and later and Python 3
647 <http://www.python.org/>
649 * librabbitmq (optional; also called “rabbitmq-c”)
650 Used by the AMQP plugin for AMQP connections, for example to RabbitMQ.
651 <http://hg.rabbitmq.com/rabbitmq-c/>
653 * librouteros (optional)
654 Used by the `routeros' plugin to connect to a device running `RouterOS'.
655 <http://verplant.org/librouteros/>
658 Used by the `rrdtool' and `rrdcached' plugins. The latter requires RRDtool
659 client support which was added after version 1.3 of RRDtool. Versions 1.0,
660 1.2 and 1.3 are known to work with the `rrdtool' plugin.
661 <http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/>
663 * librt, libsocket, libkstat, libdevinfo (optional)
664 Various standard Solaris libraries which provide system functions.
665 <http://developers.sun.com/solaris/>
667 * libsensors (optional)
668 To read from `lm_sensors', see the `sensors' plugin.
669 <http://www.lm-sensors.org/>
671 * libstatgrab (optional)
672 Used by various plugins to collect statistics on systems other than Linux
674 <http://www.i-scream.org/libstatgrab/>
676 * libtokyotyrant (optional)
677 Used by the tokyotyrant plugin.
678 <http://1978th.net/tokyotyrant/>
680 * libupsclient/nut (optional)
681 For the `nut' plugin which queries nut's `upsd'.
682 <http://networkupstools.org/>
685 Collect statistics from virtual machines.
686 <http://libvirt.org/>
689 Parse XML data. This is needed for the `ascent' and `libvirt' plugins.
690 <http://xmlsoft.org/>
693 <http://www.xmms.org/>
696 Parse JSON data. This is needed for the `curl_json' plugin.
697 <http://github.com/lloyd/yajl>
699 * libvarnish (optional)
700 Fetches statistics from a Varnish instance. This is needed for the Varnish plugin
701 <http://varnish-cache.org>
703 Configuring / Compiling / Installing
704 ------------------------------------
706 To configure, build and install collectd with the default settings, run
707 `./configure && make && make install'. For detailed, generic instructions
708 see INSTALL. For a complete list of configure options and their description,
709 run `./configure --help'.
711 By default, the configure script will check for all build dependencies and
712 disable all plugins whose requirements cannot be fulfilled (any other plugin
713 will be enabled). To enable a plugin, install missing dependencies (see
714 section `Prerequisites' above) and rerun `configure'. If you specify the
715 `--enable-<plugin>' configure option, the script will fail if the depen-
716 dencies for the specified plugin are not met. In that case you can force the
717 plugin to be built using the `--enable-<plugin>=force' configure option.
718 This will most likely fail though unless you're working in a very unusual
719 setup and you really know what you're doing. If you specify the
720 `--disable-<plugin>' configure option, the plugin will not be built. If you
721 specify the `--enable-all-plugins' or `--disable-all-plugins' configure
722 options, all plugins will be enabled or disabled respectively by default.
723 Explicitly enabling or disabling a plugin overwrites the default for the
724 specified plugin. These options are meant for package maintainers and should
725 not be used in everyday situations.
727 By default, collectd will be installed into `/opt/collectd'. You can adjust
728 this setting by specifying the `--prefix' configure option - see INSTALL for
729 details. If you pass DESTDIR=<path> to `make install', <path> will be
730 prefixed to all installation directories. This might be useful when creating
731 packages for collectd.
733 Configuring with libjvm
734 -----------------------
736 To determine the location of the required files of a Java installation is not
737 an easy task, because the locations vary with your kernel (Linux, SunOS, …)
738 and with your architecture (x86, SPARC, …) and there is no ‘java-config’
739 script we could use. Configuration of the JVM library is therefore a bit
742 The easiest way to use the `--with-java=$JAVA_HOME' option, where
743 `$JAVA_HOME' is usually something like:
744 /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0.14
746 The configure script will then use find(1) to look for the following files:
752 If found, appropriate CPP-flags and LD-flags are set and the following
753 library checks succeed.
755 If this doesn't work for you, you have the possibility to specify CPP-flags,
756 C-flags and LD-flags for the ‘Java’ plugin by hand, using the following three
757 (environment) variables:
763 For example (shortened for demonstration purposes):
765 ./configure JAVA_CPPFLAGS="-I$JAVA_HOME/include -I$JAVA_HOME/include/linux"
767 Adding "-ljvm" to the JAVA_LDFLAGS is done automatically, you don't have to
773 To compile correctly collectd needs to be able to initialize static
774 variables to NAN (Not A Number). Some C libraries, especially the GNU
775 libc, have a problem with that.
777 Luckily, with GCC it's possible to work around that problem: One can define
778 NAN as being (0.0 / 0.0) and `isnan' as `f != f'. However, to test this
779 ``implementation'' the configure script needs to compile and run a short
780 test program. Obviously running a test program when doing a cross-
781 compilation is, well, challenging.
783 If you run into this problem, you can use the `--with-nan-emulation'
784 configure option to force the use of this implementation. We can't promise
785 that the compiled binary actually behaves as it should, but since NANs
786 are likely never passed to the libm you have a good chance to be lucky.
788 Likewise, collectd needs to know the layout of doubles in memory, in order
789 to craft uniform network packets over different architectures. For this, it
790 needs to know how to convert doubles into the memory layout used by x86. The
791 configure script tries to figure this out by compiling and running a few
792 small test programs. This is of course not possible when cross-compiling.
793 You can use the `--with-fp-layout' option to tell the configure script which
794 conversion method to assume. Valid arguments are:
796 * `nothing' (12345678 -> 12345678)
797 * `endianflip' (12345678 -> 87654321)
798 * `intswap' (12345678 -> 56781234)
804 For questions, bug reports, development information and basically all other
805 concerns please send an email to collectd's mailing list at
806 <collectd at verplant.org>.
808 For live discussion and more personal contact visit us in IRC, we're in
809 channel #collectd on freenode.
815 Florian octo Forster <octo at verplant.org>,
816 Sebastian tokkee Harl <sh at tokkee.org>,
817 and many contributors (see `AUTHORS').
819 Please send bug reports and patches to the mailing list, see `Contact'