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 Various sensors in the Aquaero 5 watercooling board made by Aquacomputer.
33 Statistics about Ascent, a free server for the game `World of Warcraft'.
36 Using digital barometer sensor MPL115A2 or MPL3115 from Freescale
37 provides absolute barometric pressure, air pressure reduced to sea level
41 Batterycharge, -current and voltage of ACPI and PMU based laptop
45 Name server and resolver statistics from the `statistics-channel'
46 interface of BIND 9.5, 9,6 and later.
49 CPU accounting information for process groups under Linux.
52 Number of nf_conntrack entries.
55 Number of context switches done by the operating system.
58 CPU utilization: Time spent in the system, user, nice, idle, and related
62 CPU frequency (For laptops with speed step or a similar technology)
65 Parse statistics from websites using regular expressions.
68 Retrieves JSON data via cURL and parses it according to user
72 Retrieves XML data via cURL and parses it according to user
76 Executes SQL statements on various databases and interprets the returned
80 Mountpoint usage (Basically the values `df(1)' delivers)
83 Disk utilization: Sectors read/written, number of read/write actions,
84 average time an IO-operation took to complete.
87 DNS traffic: Query types, response codes, opcodes and traffic/octets
91 Email statistics: Count, traffic, spam scores and checks.
92 See collectd-email(5).
95 Amount of entropy available to the system.
98 Network interface card statistics.
101 Values gathered by a custom program or script.
102 See collectd-exec(5).
105 Count the number of files in directories.
108 Linux file-system based caching framework statistics.
111 Receive multicast traffic from Ganglia instances.
114 Harddisk temperatures using hddtempd.
117 Interface traffic: Number of octets, packets and errors for each
121 Iptables' counters: Number of bytes that were matched by a certain
125 IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) sensors information.
128 IPVS connection statistics (number of connections, octets and packets
129 for each service and destination).
130 See http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/software/index.html.
133 IRQ counters: Frequency in which certain interrupts occur.
136 Integrates a `Java Virtual Machine' (JVM) to execute plugins in Java
137 bytecode. See “Configuring with libjvm” below.
140 System load average over the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes.
143 Detailed CPU statistics of the “Logical Partitions” virtualization
144 technique built into IBM's POWER processors.
147 CPU, memory, disk and network I/O statistics from virtual machines.
150 Size of “Logical Volumes” (LV) and “Volume Groups” (VG) of Linux'
151 “Logical Volume Manager” (LVM).
154 Queries very detailed usage statistics from wireless LAN adapters and
155 interfaces that use the Atheros chipset and the MadWifi driver.
158 Motherboard sensors: temperature, fanspeed and voltage information,
162 Linux software-RAID device information (number of active, failed, spare
166 Query and parse data from a memcache daemon (memcached).
169 Statistics of the memcached distributed caching system.
170 <http://www.danga.com/memcached/>
173 Memory utilization: Memory occupied by running processes, page cache,
174 buffer cache and free.
177 Collects CPU usage, memory usage, temperatures and power consumption from
178 Intel Many Integrated Core (MIC) CPUs.
181 Reads values from Modbus/TCP enabled devices. Supports reading values
182 from multiple "slaves" so gateway devices can be used.
185 Information provided by serial multimeters, such as the `Metex
189 MySQL server statistics: Commands issued, handlers triggered, thread
190 usage, query cache utilization and traffic/octets sent and received.
193 Plugin to query performance values from a NetApp storage system using the
194 “Manage ONTAP” SDK provided by NetApp.
197 Very detailed Linux network interface and routing statistics. You can get
198 (detailed) information on interfaces, qdiscs, classes, and, if you can
199 make use of it, filters.
202 Receive values that were collected by other hosts. Large setups will
203 want to collect the data on one dedicated machine, and this is the
204 plugin of choice for that.
207 NFS Procedures: Which NFS command were called how often. Only NFSv2 and
211 Collects statistics from `nginx' (speak: engine X), a HTTP and mail
215 NTP daemon statistics: Local clock drift, offset to peers, etc.
218 Network UPS tools: UPS current, voltage, power, charge, utilisation,
219 temperature, etc. See upsd(8).
222 Information about Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA).
225 Queries routing information from the “Optimized Link State Routing”
228 - onewire (EXPERIMENTAL!)
229 Read onewire sensors using the owcapu library of the owfs project.
230 Please read in collectd.conf(5) why this plugin is experimental.
233 RX and TX of each client in openvpn-status.log (status-version 2).
234 <http://openvpn.net/index.php/documentation/howto.html>
237 Query data from an Oracle database.
240 The perl plugin implements a Perl-interpreter into collectd. You can
241 write your own plugins in Perl and return arbitrary values using this
242 API. See collectd-perl(5).
245 Query statistics from BSD's packet filter "pf".
248 Receive and dispatch timing values from Pinba, a profiling extension for
252 Network latency: Time to reach the default gateway or another given
256 PostgreSQL database statistics: active server connections, transaction
257 numbers, block IO, table row manipulations.
260 PowerDNS name server statistics.
263 Process counts: Number of running, sleeping, zombie, ... processes.
266 Counts various aspects of network protocols such as IP, TCP, UDP, etc.
269 The python plugin implements a Python interpreter into collectd. This
270 makes it possible to write plugins in Python which are executed by
271 collectd without the need to start a heavy interpreter every interval.
272 See collectd-python(5) for details.
275 The redis plugin gathers information from a redis server, including:
276 uptime, used memory, total connections etc.
279 Query interface and wireless registration statistics from RouterOS.
282 RRDtool caching daemon (RRDcacheD) statistics.
285 System sensors, accessed using lm_sensors: Voltages, temperatures and
289 RX and TX of serial interfaces. Linux only; needs root privileges.
292 Uses libsigrok as a backend, allowing any sigrok-supported device
293 to have its measurements fed to collectd. This includes multimeters,
294 sound level meters, thermometers, and much more.
297 Read values from SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) enabled
298 network devices such as switches, routers, thermometers, rack monitoring
299 servers, etc. See collectd-snmp(5).
302 Acts as a StatsD server, reading values sent over the network from StatsD
303 clients and calculating rates and other aggregates out of these values.
306 Pages swapped out onto harddisk or whatever is called `swap' by the OS..
309 Parse table-like structured files.
312 Follows (tails) logfiles, parses them by lines and submits matched
316 Follows (tails) files in CSV format, parses each line and submits
320 Bytes and operations read and written on tape devices. Solaris only.
323 Number of TCP connections to specific local and remote ports.
326 TeamSpeak2 server statistics.
329 Plugin to read values from `The Energy Detective' (TED).
332 Linux ACPI thermal zone information.
335 Reads the number of records and file size from a running Tokyo Tyrant
339 System uptime statistics.
342 Users currently logged in.
345 Various statistics from Varnish, an HTTP accelerator.
348 Virtual memory statistics, e. g. the number of page-ins/-outs or the
349 number of pagefaults.
352 System resources used by Linux VServers.
353 See <http://linux-vserver.org/>.
356 Link quality of wireless cards. Linux only.
359 Bitrate and frequency of music played with XMMS.
362 Statistics for ZFS' “Adaptive Replacement Cache” (ARC).
364 * Output can be written or sent to various destinations by the following
368 Sends JSON-encoded data to an Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP)
369 server, such as RabbitMQ.
372 Write to comma separated values (CSV) files. This needs lots of
373 diskspace but is extremely portable and can be analysed with almost
374 every program that can analyse anything. Even Microsoft's Excel..
377 Send the data to a remote host to save the data somehow. This is useful
378 for large setups where the data should be saved by a dedicated machine.
381 Of course the values are propagated to plugins written in Perl, too, so
382 you can easily do weird stuff with the plugins we didn't dare think of
383 ;) See collectd-perl(5).
386 It's possible to implement write plugins in Python using the python
387 plugin. See collectd-python(5) for details.
390 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using the RRDtool caching
391 daemon (RRDcacheD) - see rrdcached(1). That daemon provides a general
392 implementation of the caching done by the `rrdtool' plugin.
395 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using librrd. See rrdtool(1).
396 This is likely the most popular destination for such values. Since
397 updates to RRD-files are somewhat expensive this plugin can cache
398 updates to the files and write a bunch of updates at once, which lessens
402 One can query the values from the unixsock plugin whenever they're
403 needed. Please read collectd-unixsock(5) for a description on how that's
407 Sends data to Carbon, the storage layer of Graphite using TCP or UDP. It
408 can be configured to avoid logging send errors (especially useful when
412 Sends the values collected by collectd to a web-server using HTTP POST
413 requests. The transmitted data is either in a form understood by the
414 Exec plugin or formatted in JSON.
417 Sends data to Apache Kafka, a distributed queue.
420 Sends data to MongoDB, a NoSQL database.
423 Sends the values to a Redis key-value database server.
426 Sends data to Riemann, a stream processing and monitoring system.
428 * Logging is, as everything in collectd, provided by plugins. The following
429 plugins keep up informed about what's going on:
432 Writes log messages to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
435 Log messages are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
436 See collectd-perl(5).
439 It's possible to implement log plugins in Python using the python plugin.
440 See collectd-python(5) for details.
443 Logs to the standard UNIX logging mechanism, syslog.
446 Writes log messages formatted as logstash JSON events.
448 * Notifications can be handled by the following plugins:
451 Send a desktop notification to a notification daemon, as defined in
452 the Desktop Notification Specification. To actually display the
453 notifications, notification-daemon is required.
454 See http://www.galago-project.org/specs/notification/.
457 Send an E-mail with the notification message to the configured
461 Execute a program or script to handle the notification.
462 See collectd-exec(5).
465 Writes the notification message to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
468 Send the notification to a remote host to handle it somehow.
471 Notifications are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
472 See collectd-perl(5).
475 It's possible to implement notification plugins in Python using the
476 python plugin. See collectd-python(5) for details.
478 * Value processing can be controlled using the "filter chain" infrastructure
479 and "matches" and "targets". The following plugins are available:
481 - match_empty_counter
482 Match counter values which are currently zero.
485 Match values using a hash function of the hostname.
488 Match values by their identifier based on regular expressions.
491 Match values with an invalid timestamp.
494 Select values by their data sources' values.
496 - target_notification
497 Create and dispatch a notification.
500 Replace parts of an identifier using regular expressions.
503 Scale (multiply) values by an arbitrary value.
506 Set (overwrite) entire parts of an identifier.
508 * Miscellaneous plugins:
511 Selects multiple value lists based on patterns or regular expressions
512 and creates new aggregated values lists from those.
515 Checks values against configured thresholds and creates notifications if
516 values are out of bounds. See collectd-threshold(5) for details.
519 Sets the hostname to an unique identifier. This is meant for setups
520 where each client may migrate to another physical host, possibly going
521 through one or more name changes in the process.
523 * Performance: Since collectd is running as a daemon it doesn't spend much
524 time starting up again and again. With the exception of the exec plugin no
525 processes are forked. Caching in output plugins, such as the rrdtool and
526 network plugins, makes sure your resources are used efficiently. Also,
527 since collectd is programmed multithreaded it benefits from hyperthreading
528 and multicore processors and makes sure that the daemon isn't idle if only
529 one plugin waits for an IO-operation to complete.
531 * Once set up, hardly any maintenance is necessary. Setup is kept as easy
532 as possible and the default values should be okay for most users.
538 * collectd's configuration file can be found at `sysconfdir'/collectd.conf.
539 Run `collectd -h' for a list of builtin defaults. See `collectd.conf(5)'
540 for a list of options and a syntax description.
542 * When the `csv' or `rrdtool' plugins are loaded they'll write the values to
543 files. The usual place for these files is beneath `/var/lib/collectd'.
545 * When using some of the plugins, collectd needs to run as user root, since
546 only root can do certain things, such as craft ICMP packages needed to ping
547 other hosts. collectd should NOT be installed setuid root since it can be
548 used to overwrite valuable files!
550 * Sample scripts to generate graphs reside in `contrib/' in the source
551 package or somewhere near `/usr/share/doc/collectd' in most distributions.
552 Please be aware that those script are meant as a starting point for your
553 own experiments.. Some of them require the `RRDs' Perl module.
554 (`librrds-perl' on Debian) If you have written a more sophisticated
555 solution please share it with us.
557 * The RRAs of the automatically created RRD files depend on the `step'
558 and `heartbeat' settings given. If change these settings you may need to
559 re-create the files, losing all data. Please be aware of that when changing
560 the values and read the rrdtool(1) manpage thoroughly.
563 collectd and chkrootkit
564 -----------------------
566 If you are using the `dns' plugin chkrootkit(1) will report collectd as a
567 packet sniffer ("<iface>: PACKET SNIFFER(/usr/sbin/collectd[<pid>])"). The
568 plugin captures all UDP packets on port 53 to analyze the DNS traffic. In
569 this case, collectd is a legitimate sniffer and the report should be
570 considered to be a false positive. However, you might want to check that
571 this really is collectd and not some other, illegitimate sniffer.
577 To compile collectd from source you will need:
579 * Usual suspects: C compiler, linker, preprocessor, make, ...
581 * A POSIX-threads (pthread) implementation.
582 Since gathering some statistics is slow (network connections, slow devices,
583 etc) collectd is parallelized. The POSIX threads interface is being
584 used and should be found in various implementations for hopefully all
587 * aerotools-ng (optional)
588 Used by the `aquaero' plugin. Currently, the `libaquaero5' library, which
589 is used by the `aerotools-ng' toolkit, is not compiled as a shared object
590 nor does it feature an installation routine. Therefore, you need to point
591 collectd's configure script at the source directory of the `aerotools-ng'
593 <https://github.com/lynix/aerotools-ng>
595 * CoreFoundation.framework and IOKit.framework (optional)
596 For compiling on Darwin in general and the `apple_sensors' plugin in
598 <http://developer.apple.com/corefoundation/>
600 * libclntsh (optional)
601 Used by the `oracle' plugin.
603 * libcredis (optional)
604 Used by the `redis' plugin. Please note that you require a 0.2.2 version
605 or higher. <http://code.google.com/p/credis/>
608 If you want to use the `apache', `ascent', `bind', `curl', `curl_json',
609 `curl_xml', `nginx', or `write_http' plugin.
610 <http://curl.haxx.se/>
613 Used by the `dbi' plugin to connect to various databases.
614 <http://libdbi.sourceforge.net/>
616 * libesmtp (optional)
617 For the `notify_email' plugin.
618 <http://www.stafford.uklinux.net/libesmtp/>
620 * libganglia (optional)
621 Used by the `gmond' plugin to process data received from Ganglia.
622 <http://ganglia.info/>
624 * libgcrypt (optional)
625 Used by the `network' plugin for encryption and authentication.
626 <http://www.gnupg.org/>
629 If present, the `uuid' plugin will check for UUID from HAL.
630 <http://hal.freedesktop.org/>
632 * libi2c-dev (optional)
633 Used for the plugin `barometer', provides just the i2c-dev.h header file
634 for user space i2c development.
637 For querying iptables counters.
638 <http://netfilter.org/>
641 Library that encapsulates the `Java Virtual Machine' (JVM). This library is
642 used by the `java' plugin to execute Java bytecode. See “Configuring with
644 <http://openjdk.java.net/> (and others)
647 Used by the `lvm' plugin.
648 <ftp://sources.redhat.com/pub/lvm2/>
650 * libmemcached (optional)
651 Used by the `memcachec' plugin to connect to a memcache daemon.
652 <http://tangent.org/552/libmemcached.html>
655 Used by the `netlink' plugin.
656 <http://www.netfilter.org/projects/libmnl/>
658 * libmodbus (optional)
659 Used by the `modbus' plugin to communicate with Modbus/TCP devices. The
660 `modbus' plugin works with version 2.0.3 of the library – due to frequent
661 API changes other versions may or may not compile cleanly.
662 <http://www.libmodbus.org/>
664 * libmysqlclient (optional)
665 Unsurprisingly used by the `mysql' plugin.
666 <http://dev.mysql.com/>
668 * libnetapp (optional)
669 Required for the `netapp' plugin.
670 This library is part of the “Manage ONTAP SDK” published by NetApp.
672 * libnetsnmp (optional)
673 For the `snmp' plugin.
674 <http://www.net-snmp.org/>
676 * libnotify (optional)
677 For the `notify_desktop' plugin.
678 <http://www.galago-project.org/>
680 * libopenipmi (optional)
681 Used by the `ipmi' plugin to prove IPMI devices.
682 <http://openipmi.sourceforge.net/>
684 * liboping (optional)
685 Used by the `ping' plugin to send and receive ICMP packets.
686 <http://octo.it/liboping/>
688 * libowcapi (optional)
689 Used by the `onewire' plugin to read values from onewire sensors (or the
691 <http://www.owfs.org/>
694 Used to capture packets by the `dns' plugin.
695 <http://www.tcpdump.org/>
697 * libperfstat (optional)
698 Used by various plugins to gather statistics under AIX.
701 Obviously used by the `perl' plugin. The library has to be compiled with
702 ithread support (introduced in Perl 5.6.0).
703 <http://www.perl.org/>
706 The PostgreSQL C client library used by the `postgresql' plugin.
707 <http://www.postgresql.org/>
709 * libprotobuf-c, protoc-c (optional)
710 Used by the `pinba' plugin to generate a parser for the network packets
711 sent by the Pinba PHP extension, and by the `write_riemann' plugin to
712 generate events to be sent to a Riemann server.
713 <http://code.google.com/p/protobuf-c/>
715 * libpython (optional)
716 Used by the `python' plugin. Currently, Python 2.3 and later and Python 3
718 <http://www.python.org/>
720 * librabbitmq (optional; also called “rabbitmq-c”)
721 Used by the `amqp' plugin for AMQP connections, for example to RabbitMQ.
722 <http://hg.rabbitmq.com/rabbitmq-c/>
724 * librdkafka (optional; also called “rdkafka”)
725 Used by the `write_kafka' plugin for producing messages and sending them
727 <https://github.com/edenhill/librdkafka>
729 * librouteros (optional)
730 Used by the `routeros' plugin to connect to a device running `RouterOS'.
731 <http://octo.it/librouteros/>
734 Used by the `rrdtool' and `rrdcached' plugins. The latter requires RRDtool
735 client support which was added after version 1.3 of RRDtool. Versions 1.0,
736 1.2 and 1.3 are known to work with the `rrdtool' plugin.
737 <http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/>
739 * librt, libsocket, libkstat, libdevinfo (optional)
740 Various standard Solaris libraries which provide system functions.
741 <http://developers.sun.com/solaris/>
743 * libsensors (optional)
744 To read from `lm_sensors', see the `sensors' plugin.
745 <http://www.lm-sensors.org/>
747 * libsigrok (optional)
748 Used by the `sigrok' plugin. In addition, libsigrok depends on glib,
749 libzip, and optionally (depending on which drivers are enabled) on
750 libusb, libftdi and libudev.
752 * libstatgrab (optional)
753 Used by various plugins to collect statistics on systems other than Linux
755 <http://www.i-scream.org/libstatgrab/>
757 * libtokyotyrant (optional)
758 Used by the `tokyotyrant' plugin.
759 <http://1978th.net/tokyotyrant/>
761 * libupsclient/nut (optional)
762 For the `nut' plugin which queries nut's `upsd'.
763 <http://networkupstools.org/>
766 Collect statistics from virtual machines.
767 <http://libvirt.org/>
770 Parse XML data. This is needed for the `ascent', `bind', `curl_xml' and
772 <http://xmlsoft.org/>
775 <http://www.xmms.org/>
778 Parse JSON data. This is needed for the `curl_json' and `log_logstash'
780 <http://github.com/lloyd/yajl>
782 * libvarnish (optional)
783 Fetches statistics from a Varnish instance. This is needed for the
785 <http://varnish-cache.org>
787 Configuring / Compiling / Installing
788 ------------------------------------
790 To configure, build and install collectd with the default settings, run
791 `./configure && make && make install'. For detailed, generic instructions
792 see INSTALL. For a complete list of configure options and their description,
793 run `./configure --help'.
795 By default, the configure script will check for all build dependencies and
796 disable all plugins whose requirements cannot be fulfilled (any other plugin
797 will be enabled). To enable a plugin, install missing dependencies (see
798 section `Prerequisites' above) and rerun `configure'. If you specify the
799 `--enable-<plugin>' configure option, the script will fail if the depen-
800 dencies for the specified plugin are not met. In that case you can force the
801 plugin to be built using the `--enable-<plugin>=force' configure option.
802 This will most likely fail though unless you're working in a very unusual
803 setup and you really know what you're doing. If you specify the
804 `--disable-<plugin>' configure option, the plugin will not be built. If you
805 specify the `--enable-all-plugins' or `--disable-all-plugins' configure
806 options, all plugins will be enabled or disabled respectively by default.
807 Explicitly enabling or disabling a plugin overwrites the default for the
808 specified plugin. These options are meant for package maintainers and should
809 not be used in everyday situations.
811 By default, collectd will be installed into `/opt/collectd'. You can adjust
812 this setting by specifying the `--prefix' configure option - see INSTALL for
813 details. If you pass DESTDIR=<path> to `make install', <path> will be
814 prefixed to all installation directories. This might be useful when creating
815 packages for collectd.
817 Configuring with libjvm
818 -----------------------
820 To determine the location of the required files of a Java installation is not
821 an easy task, because the locations vary with your kernel (Linux, SunOS, …)
822 and with your architecture (x86, SPARC, …) and there is no ‘java-config’
823 script we could use. Configuration of the JVM library is therefore a bit
826 The easiest way to use the `--with-java=$JAVA_HOME' option, where
827 `$JAVA_HOME' is usually something like:
828 /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0.14
830 The configure script will then use find(1) to look for the following files:
836 If found, appropriate CPP-flags and LD-flags are set and the following
837 library checks succeed.
839 If this doesn't work for you, you have the possibility to specify CPP-flags,
840 C-flags and LD-flags for the ‘Java’ plugin by hand, using the following three
841 (environment) variables:
847 For example (shortened for demonstration purposes):
849 ./configure JAVA_CPPFLAGS="-I$JAVA_HOME/include -I$JAVA_HOME/include/linux"
851 Adding "-ljvm" to the JAVA_LDFLAGS is done automatically, you don't have to
857 To compile correctly collectd needs to be able to initialize static
858 variables to NAN (Not A Number). Some C libraries, especially the GNU
859 libc, have a problem with that.
861 Luckily, with GCC it's possible to work around that problem: One can define
862 NAN as being (0.0 / 0.0) and `isnan' as `f != f'. However, to test this
863 ``implementation'' the configure script needs to compile and run a short
864 test program. Obviously running a test program when doing a cross-
865 compilation is, well, challenging.
867 If you run into this problem, you can use the `--with-nan-emulation'
868 configure option to force the use of this implementation. We can't promise
869 that the compiled binary actually behaves as it should, but since NANs
870 are likely never passed to the libm you have a good chance to be lucky.
872 Likewise, collectd needs to know the layout of doubles in memory, in order
873 to craft uniform network packets over different architectures. For this, it
874 needs to know how to convert doubles into the memory layout used by x86. The
875 configure script tries to figure this out by compiling and running a few
876 small test programs. This is of course not possible when cross-compiling.
877 You can use the `--with-fp-layout' option to tell the configure script which
878 conversion method to assume. Valid arguments are:
880 * `nothing' (12345678 -> 12345678)
881 * `endianflip' (12345678 -> 87654321)
882 * `intswap' (12345678 -> 56781234)
888 For questions, bug reports, development information and basically all other
889 concerns please send an email to collectd's mailing list at
890 <list at collectd.org>.
892 For live discussion and more personal contact visit us in IRC, we're in
893 channel #collectd on freenode.
899 Florian octo Forster <octo at collectd.org>,
900 Sebastian tokkee Harl <sh at tokkee.org>,
901 and many contributors (see `AUTHORS').
903 Please send bug reports and patches to the mailing list, see `Contact'
projects / collectd.git / blob