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 Count the number of files in directories.
69 Harddisk temperatures using hddtempd.
72 Interface traffic: Number of octets, packets and errors for each
76 Iptables' counters: Number of bytes that were matched by a certain
80 IPVS connection statistics (number of connections, octets and packets
81 for each service and destination).
82 See http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/software/index.html.
85 IRQ counters: Frequency in which certain interrupts occur.
88 System load average over the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes.
91 CPU, disk and network I/O statistics from virtual machines.
94 Motherboard sensors: temperature, fanspeed and voltage information,
98 Statistics of the memcached distributed caching system.
99 <http://www.danga.com/memcached/>
102 Memory utilization: Memory occupied by running processes, page cache,
103 buffer cache and free.
106 Information provided by serial multimeters, such as the `Metex
110 MySQL server statistics: Commands issued, handlers triggered, thread
111 usage, query cache utilization and traffic/octets sent and received.
114 Very detailed Linux network interface and routing statistics. You can get
115 (detailed) information on interfaces, qdiscs, classes, and, if you can
116 make use of it, filters.
119 Receive values that were collected by other hosts. Large setups will
120 want to collect the data on one dedicated machine, and this is the
121 plugin of choice for that.
124 NFS Procedures: Which NFS command were called how often. Only NFSv2 and
128 Collects statistics from `nginx' (speak: engine X), a HTTP and mail
132 NTP daemon statistics: Local clock drift, offset to peers, etc.
135 Network UPS tools: UPS current, voltage, power, charge, utilisation,
136 temperature, etc. See upsd(8).
139 Read onewire sensors using the owcapu library of the owfs project.
142 The perl plugin implements a Perl-interpreter into collectd. You can
143 write your own plugins in Perl and return arbitrary values using this
144 API. See collectd-perl(5).
147 Network latency: Time to reach the default gateway or another given
151 PostgreSQL database statistics: active server connections, transaction
152 numbers, block IO, table row manipulations.
155 Process counts: Number of running, sleeping, zombie, ... processes.
158 System sensors, accessed using lm_sensors: Voltages, temperatures and
162 RX and TX of serial interfaces. Linux only; needs root privileges.
165 Read values from SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) enabled
166 network devices such as switches, routers, thermometers, rack monitoring
167 servers, etc. See collectd-snmp(5).
170 Pages swapped out onto harddisk or whatever is called `swap' by the OS..
173 Follows (tails) logfiles, parses them by lines and submits matched
177 Bytes and operations read and written on tape devices. Solaris only.
180 Number of TCP connections to specific local and remote ports.
183 Users currently logged in.
186 Virtual memory statistics, e. g. the number of page-ins/-outs or the
187 number of pagefaults.
190 System resources used by Linux VServers.
191 See <http://linux-vserver.org/>.
194 Link quality of wireless cards. Linux only.
197 Bitrate and frequency of music played with XMMS.
199 * Output can be written or send to various destinations by the following
203 Write to comma separated values (CSV) files. This needs lots of
204 diskspace but is extremely portable and can be analysed with almost
205 every program that can analyse anything. Even Microsoft's Excel..
208 Send the data to a remote host to save the data somehow. This is useful
209 for large setups where the data should be saved by a dedicated machine.
212 Of course the values are propagated to plugins written in Perl, too, so
213 you can easily do weird stuff with the plugins we didn't dare think of
214 ;) See collectd-perl(5).
217 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using librrd. See rrdtool(1).
218 This is likely the most popular destination for such values. Since
219 updates to RRD-files are somewhat expensive this plugin can cache
220 updates to the files and write a bunch of updates at once, which lessens
224 One can query the values from the unixsock plugin whenever they're
225 needed. Please read collectd-unixsock(5) for a description on how that's
228 * Logging is, as everything in collectd, provided by plugins. The following
229 plugins keep up informed about what's going on:
232 Writes logmessages to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
235 Log messages are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
236 See collectd-perl(5).
239 Logs to the standard UNIX logging mechanism, syslog.
241 * Notifications can be handled by the following plugins:
244 Send a desktop notification to a notification daemon, as defined in
245 the Desktop Notification Specification. To actually display the
246 notifications, notification-daemon is required.
247 See http://www.galago-project.org/specs/notification/.
250 Send an E-mail with the notification message to the configured
254 Execute a program or script to handle the notification.
255 See collectd-exec(5).
258 Writes the notification message to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
261 Send the notification to a remote host to handle it somehow.
264 Notifications are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
265 See collectd-perl(5).
267 * Miscellaneous plugins:
270 Sets the hostname to an unique identifier. This is meant for setups
271 where each client may migrate to another physical host, possibly going
272 through one or more name changes in the process.
274 * Performance: Since collectd is running as a daemon it doesn't spend much
275 time starting up again and again. With the exception of the exec plugin no
276 processes are forked. Caching in output plugins, such as the rrdtool and
277 network plugins, makes sure your resources are used efficiently. Also,
278 since collectd is programmed multithreaded it benefits from hyperthreading
279 and multicore processors and makes sure that the daemon isn't idle if only
280 one plugins waits for an IO-operation to complete.
282 * Once set up, hardly any maintenance is necessary. Setup is kept as easy
283 as possible and the default values should be okay for most users.
289 * collectd's configuration file can be found at `sysconfdir'/collectd.conf.
290 Run `collectd -h' for a list of builtin defaults. See `collectd.conf(5)'
291 for a list of options and a syntax description.
293 * When the `csv' or `rrdtool' plugins are loaded they'll write the values to
294 files. The usual place for these files is beneath `/var/lib/collectd'.
296 * When using some of the plugins, collectd needs to run as user root, since
297 only root can do certain things, such as craft ICMP packages needed to ping
298 other hosts. collectd should NOT be installed setuid root since it can be
299 used to overwrite valuable files!
301 * Sample scripts to generate graphs reside in `contrib/' in the source
302 package or somewhere near `/usr/share/doc/collectd' in most distributions.
303 Please be aware that those script are meant as a starting point for your
304 own experiments.. Some of them require the `RRDs' Perl module.
305 (`librrds-perl' on Debian) If you have written a more sophisticated
306 solution please share it with us.
308 * The RRAs of the automatically created RRD files depend on the `step'
309 and `heartbeat' settings given. If change these settings you may need to
310 re-create the files, losing all data. Please be aware of that when changing
311 the values and read the rrdtool(1) manpage thoroughly.
314 collectd and chkrootkit
315 -----------------------
317 If you are using the `dns' plugin chkrootkit(1) will report collectd as a
318 packet sniffer ("<iface>: PACKET SNIFFER(/usr/sbin/collectd[<pid>])"). The
319 plugin captures all UDP packets on port 53 to analyze the DNS traffic. In
320 this case, collectd is a legitimate sniffer and the report should be
321 considered to be a false positive. However, you might want to check that
322 this really is collectd and not some other, illegitimate sniffer.
328 To compile collectd from source you will need:
330 * Usual suspects: C compiler, linker, preprocessor, make, ...
332 * A POSIX-threads (pthread) implementation.
333 Since gathering some statistics is slow (network connections, slow devices,
334 etc) the collectd is parallelized. The POSIX threads interface is being
335 used and should be found in various implementations for hopefully all
338 * CoreFoundation.framework and IOKit.framework (optional)
339 For compiling on Darwin in general and the `apple_sensors' plugin in
343 If you want to use the `apache', `ascent', or `nginx' plugin.
345 * libesmtp (optional)
346 For the `notify_email' plugin.
349 If present, the uuid plugin will check for UUID from HAL.
352 For querying iptables counters.
354 * libmysqlclient (optional)
355 Unsurprisingly used by the `mysql' plugin.
357 * libnetlink (optional)
358 Used, obviously, for the `netlink' plugin.
360 * libnetsnmp (optional)
361 For the `snmp' plugin.
363 * libnotify (optional)
364 For the `notify_desktop' plugin.
366 * liboping (optional, if not found a version shipped with this distribution
368 Used by the `ping' plugin to send and receive ICMP packets.
370 * libowcapi (optional)
371 Used by the `onewire' plugin to read values from onewire sensors (or the
375 Used to capture packets by the `dns' plugin.
378 Obviously used by the `perl' plugin. The library has to be compiled with
379 ithread support (introduced in Perl 5.6.0).
382 The PostgreSQL C client library used by the `postgresql' plugin.
384 * librrd (optional; headers and library; rrdtool 1.0 and 1.2 both work fine)
385 If built without `librrd' the resulting binary will be `client only', i.e.
386 will send its values via multicast and not create any RRD files itself.
387 Alternatively you can chose to write CSV-files (Comma Separated Values)
390 * librt, libsocket, libkstat, libdevinfo (optional)
391 Various standard Solaris libraries which provide system functions.
393 * libsensors (optional)
394 To read from `lm_sensors', see the `sensors' plugin.
396 * libstatgrab (optional) may be used to collect statistics on systems other
397 than Linux and/or Solaris. Note that CPU- and disk-statistics, while being
398 provided by this library, are not supported in collectd right now..
399 <http://www.i-scream.org/libstatgrab/>
401 * libupsclient/nut (optional)
402 For the `nut' plugin which queries nut's `upsd'.
405 Collect statistics from virtual machines.
408 Parse XML data. This is needed for the `ascent' and `libvirt' plugins.
413 Configuring / Compiling / Installing
414 ------------------------------------
416 To configure, build and install collectd with the default settings, run
417 `./configure && make && make install'. For detailed, generic instructions
418 see INSTALL. For a complete list of configure options and their description,
419 run `./configure --help'.
421 By default, the configure script will check for all build dependencies and
422 disable all plugins whose requirements cannot be fulfilled (any other plugin
423 will be enabled). To enable a plugin, install missing dependencies (see
424 section `Prerequisites' above) and rerun `configure'. If you specify the
425 `--enable-<plugin>' configure option, you can force the plugin to be built.
426 This will most likely fail though unless you're working in a very unusual
427 setup and you really know what you're doing.
429 By default, collectd will be installed into `/opt/collectd'. You can adjust
430 this setting by specifying the `--prefix' configure option - see INSTALL for
431 details. If you pass DESTDIR=<path> to `make install', <path> will be
432 prefixed to all installation directories. This might be useful when creating
433 packages for collectd.
439 To compile correctly collectd needs to be able to initialize static
440 variables to NAN (Not A Number). Some C libraries, especially the GNU
441 libc, have a problem with that.
443 Luckily, with GCC it's possible to work around that problem: One can define
444 NAN as being (0.0 / 0.0) and `isnan' as `f != f'. However, to test this
445 ``implementation'' the configure script needs to compile and run a short
446 test program. Obviously running a test program when doing a cross-
447 compilation is, well, challenging.
449 If you run into this problem, you can use the `--with-nan-emulation'
450 configure option to force the use of this implementation. We can't promise
451 that the compiled binary actually behaves as it should, but since NANs
452 are likely never passed to the libm you have a good chance to be lucky.
458 For questions, bugreports, development information and basically all other
459 concerns please send an email to collectd's mailinglist at
460 <collectd at verplant.org>.
462 For live discussion and more personal contact visit us in IRC, we're in
463 channel #collectd on freenode.
469 Florian octo Forster <octo at verplant.org>,
470 Sebastian tokkee Harl <sh at tokkee.org>,
471 and many contributors (see `AUTHORS').
473 Please send bugreports and patches to the mailinglist, see `Contact' above.