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 Queries very detailed usage statistics from wireless LAN adapters and
126 interfaces that use the Atheros chipset and the MadWifi driver.
129 Motherboard sensors: temperature, fanspeed and voltage information,
133 Query and parse data from a memcache daemon (memcached).
136 Statistics of the memcached distributed caching system.
137 <http://www.danga.com/memcached/>
140 Memory utilization: Memory occupied by running processes, page cache,
141 buffer cache and free.
144 Information provided by serial multimeters, such as the `Metex
148 MySQL server statistics: Commands issued, handlers triggered, thread
149 usage, query cache utilization and traffic/octets sent and received.
152 Very detailed Linux network interface and routing statistics. You can get
153 (detailed) information on interfaces, qdiscs, classes, and, if you can
154 make use of it, filters.
157 Receive values that were collected by other hosts. Large setups will
158 want to collect the data on one dedicated machine, and this is the
159 plugin of choice for that.
162 NFS Procedures: Which NFS command were called how often. Only NFSv2 and
166 Collects statistics from `nginx' (speak: engine X), a HTTP and mail
170 NTP daemon statistics: Local clock drift, offset to peers, etc.
173 Network UPS tools: UPS current, voltage, power, charge, utilisation,
174 temperature, etc. See upsd(8).
177 Queries routing information from the “Optimized Link State Routing”
180 - onewire (EXPERIMENTAL!)
181 Read onewire sensors using the owcapu library of the owfs project.
182 Please read in collectd.conf(5) why this plugin is experimental.
185 RX and TX of each client in openvpn-status.log (status-version 2).
186 <http://openvpn.net/index.php/documentation/howto.html>
189 Query data from an Oracle database.
192 The perl plugin implements a Perl-interpreter into collectd. You can
193 write your own plugins in Perl and return arbitrary values using this
194 API. See collectd-perl(5).
197 Network latency: Time to reach the default gateway or another given
201 PostgreSQL database statistics: active server connections, transaction
202 numbers, block IO, table row manipulations.
205 PowerDNS name server statistics.
208 Process counts: Number of running, sleeping, zombie, ... processes.
211 Counts various aspects of network protocols such as IP, TCP, UDP, etc.
214 RRDtool caching daemon (RRDcacheD) statistics.
217 System sensors, accessed using lm_sensors: Voltages, temperatures and
221 RX and TX of serial interfaces. Linux only; needs root privileges.
224 Read values from SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) enabled
225 network devices such as switches, routers, thermometers, rack monitoring
226 servers, etc. See collectd-snmp(5).
229 Pages swapped out onto harddisk or whatever is called `swap' by the OS..
232 Parse table-like structured files.
235 Follows (tails) logfiles, parses them by lines and submits matched
239 Bytes and operations read and written on tape devices. Solaris only.
242 Number of TCP connections to specific local and remote ports.
245 TeamSpeak2 server statistics.
248 Plugin to read values from `The Energy Detective' (TED).
251 Linux ACPI thermal zone information.
254 Reads the number of records and file size from a running Tokyo Tyrant
258 System uptime statistics.
261 Users currently logged in.
264 Virtual memory statistics, e. g. the number of page-ins/-outs or the
265 number of pagefaults.
268 System resources used by Linux VServers.
269 See <http://linux-vserver.org/>.
272 Link quality of wireless cards. Linux only.
275 Bitrate and frequency of music played with XMMS.
278 Statistics for ZFS' “Adaptive Replacement Cache” (ARC).
280 * Output can be written or send to various destinations by the following
284 Write to comma separated values (CSV) files. This needs lots of
285 diskspace but is extremely portable and can be analysed with almost
286 every program that can analyse anything. Even Microsoft's Excel..
289 Send the data to a remote host to save the data somehow. This is useful
290 for large setups where the data should be saved by a dedicated machine.
293 Of course the values are propagated to plugins written in Perl, too, so
294 you can easily do weird stuff with the plugins we didn't dare think of
295 ;) See collectd-perl(5).
298 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using the RRDtool caching
299 daemon (RRDcacheD) - see rrdcached(1). That daemon provides a general
300 implementation of the caching done by the `rrdtool' plugin.
303 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using librrd. See rrdtool(1).
304 This is likely the most popular destination for such values. Since
305 updates to RRD-files are somewhat expensive this plugin can cache
306 updates to the files and write a bunch of updates at once, which lessens
310 One can query the values from the unixsock plugin whenever they're
311 needed. Please read collectd-unixsock(5) for a description on how that's
315 Sends the values collected by collectd to a web-server using HTTP POST
316 requests. The transmitted data is either in a form understood by the
317 Exec plugin or formatted in JSON.
319 * Logging is, as everything in collectd, provided by plugins. The following
320 plugins keep up informed about what's going on:
323 Writes logmessages to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
326 Log messages are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
327 See collectd-perl(5).
330 Logs to the standard UNIX logging mechanism, syslog.
332 * Notifications can be handled by the following plugins:
335 Send a desktop notification to a notification daemon, as defined in
336 the Desktop Notification Specification. To actually display the
337 notifications, notification-daemon is required.
338 See http://www.galago-project.org/specs/notification/.
341 Send an E-mail with the notification message to the configured
345 Execute a program or script to handle the notification.
346 See collectd-exec(5).
349 Writes the notification message to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
352 Send the notification to a remote host to handle it somehow.
355 Notifications are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
356 See collectd-perl(5).
358 * Value processing can be controlled using the "filter chain" infrastructure
359 and "matches" and "targets". The following plugins are available:
361 - match_empty_counter
362 Match counter values which are currently zero.
365 Match values by their identifier based on regular expressions.
368 Match values with an invalid timestamp.
371 Select values by their data sources' values.
373 - target_notification
374 Create and dispatch a notification.
377 Replace parts of an identifier using regular expressions.
380 Set (overwrite) entire parts of an identifier.
382 * Miscellaneous plugins:
385 Sets the hostname to an unique identifier. This is meant for setups
386 where each client may migrate to another physical host, possibly going
387 through one or more name changes in the process.
389 * Performance: Since collectd is running as a daemon it doesn't spend much
390 time starting up again and again. With the exception of the exec plugin no
391 processes are forked. Caching in output plugins, such as the rrdtool and
392 network plugins, makes sure your resources are used efficiently. Also,
393 since collectd is programmed multithreaded it benefits from hyperthreading
394 and multicore processors and makes sure that the daemon isn't idle if only
395 one plugins waits for an IO-operation to complete.
397 * Once set up, hardly any maintenance is necessary. Setup is kept as easy
398 as possible and the default values should be okay for most users.
404 * collectd's configuration file can be found at `sysconfdir'/collectd.conf.
405 Run `collectd -h' for a list of builtin defaults. See `collectd.conf(5)'
406 for a list of options and a syntax description.
408 * When the `csv' or `rrdtool' plugins are loaded they'll write the values to
409 files. The usual place for these files is beneath `/var/lib/collectd'.
411 * When using some of the plugins, collectd needs to run as user root, since
412 only root can do certain things, such as craft ICMP packages needed to ping
413 other hosts. collectd should NOT be installed setuid root since it can be
414 used to overwrite valuable files!
416 * Sample scripts to generate graphs reside in `contrib/' in the source
417 package or somewhere near `/usr/share/doc/collectd' in most distributions.
418 Please be aware that those script are meant as a starting point for your
419 own experiments.. Some of them require the `RRDs' Perl module.
420 (`librrds-perl' on Debian) If you have written a more sophisticated
421 solution please share it with us.
423 * The RRAs of the automatically created RRD files depend on the `step'
424 and `heartbeat' settings given. If change these settings you may need to
425 re-create the files, losing all data. Please be aware of that when changing
426 the values and read the rrdtool(1) manpage thoroughly.
429 collectd and chkrootkit
430 -----------------------
432 If you are using the `dns' plugin chkrootkit(1) will report collectd as a
433 packet sniffer ("<iface>: PACKET SNIFFER(/usr/sbin/collectd[<pid>])"). The
434 plugin captures all UDP packets on port 53 to analyze the DNS traffic. In
435 this case, collectd is a legitimate sniffer and the report should be
436 considered to be a false positive. However, you might want to check that
437 this really is collectd and not some other, illegitimate sniffer.
443 To compile collectd from source you will need:
445 * Usual suspects: C compiler, linker, preprocessor, make, ...
447 * A POSIX-threads (pthread) implementation.
448 Since gathering some statistics is slow (network connections, slow devices,
449 etc) the collectd is parallelized. The POSIX threads interface is being
450 used and should be found in various implementations for hopefully all
453 * CoreFoundation.framework and IOKit.framework (optional)
454 For compiling on Darwin in general and the `apple_sensors' plugin in
456 <http://developer.apple.com/corefoundation/>
458 * libclntsh (optional)
459 Used by the `oracle' plugin.
462 If you want to use the `apache', `ascent', `curl', `nginx', or `write_http'
464 <http://curl.haxx.se/>
467 Used by the `dbi' plugin to connect to various databases.
468 <http://libdbi.sourceforge.net/>
470 * libesmtp (optional)
471 For the `notify_email' plugin.
472 <http://www.stafford.uklinux.net/libesmtp/>
474 * libganglia (optional)
475 Used by the `gmond' plugin to process data received from Ganglia.
477 * libgcrypt (optional)
478 Used by the `network' plugin for encryption and authentication.
481 If present, the uuid plugin will check for UUID from HAL.
482 <http://hal.freedesktop.org/>
485 For querying iptables counters.
486 <http://netfilter.org/>
488 If not found on the system, a version shipped with this distribution can
489 be used. It requires some Linux headers in /usr/include/linux. You can
490 force the build system to use the shipped version by specifying
491 --with-libiptc=shipped
492 when running the configure script.
495 Library that encapsulates the `Java Virtual Machine' (JVM). This library is
496 used by the Java plugin to execute Java bytecode. See “Configuring with
499 * libmemcached (optional)
500 Used by the `memcachec' plugin to connect to a memcache daemon.
502 * libmysqlclient (optional)
503 Unsurprisingly used by the `mysql' plugin.
504 <http://dev.mysql.com/>
506 * libnetlink (optional)
507 Used, obviously, for the `netlink' plugin.
508 <http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Net:Iproute2>
510 * libnetsnmp (optional)
511 For the `snmp' plugin.
512 <http://www.net-snmp.org/>
514 * libnotify (optional)
515 For the `notify_desktop' plugin.
516 <http://www.galago-project.org/>
518 * liboping (optional)
519 Used by the `ping' plugin to send and receive ICMP packets.
520 <http://verplant.org/liboping/>
522 * libowcapi (optional)
523 Used by the `onewire' plugin to read values from onewire sensors (or the
525 <http://www.owfs.org/>
528 Used to capture packets by the `dns' plugin.
529 <http://www.tcpdump.org/>
532 Obviously used by the `perl' plugin. The library has to be compiled with
533 ithread support (introduced in Perl 5.6.0).
534 <http://www.perl.org/>
537 The PostgreSQL C client library used by the `postgresql' plugin.
538 <http://www.postgresql.org/>
541 Used by the `rrdtool' and `rrdcached' plugins. The latter requires RRDtool
542 client support which was added after version 1.3 of RRDtool. Versions 1.0,
543 1.2 and 1.3 are known to work with the `rrdtool' plugin.
544 <http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/>
546 * librt, libsocket, libkstat, libdevinfo (optional)
547 Various standard Solaris libraries which provide system functions.
548 <http://developers.sun.com/solaris/>
550 * libsensors (optional)
551 To read from `lm_sensors', see the `sensors' plugin.
552 <http://www.lm-sensors.org/>
554 * libstatgrab (optional)
555 Used by various plugins to collect statistics on systems other than Linux
557 <http://www.i-scream.org/libstatgrab/>
559 * libupsclient/nut (optional)
560 For the `nut' plugin which queries nut's `upsd'.
561 <http://networkupstools.org/>
564 Collect statistics from virtual machines.
565 <http://libvirt.org/>
568 Parse XML data. This is needed for the `ascent' and `libvirt' plugins.
569 <http://xmlsoft.org/>
572 <http://www.xmms.org/>
575 Parse JSON data. This is needed for the `curl_json' plugin.
576 <http://www.lloydforge.org/projects/yajl/>
578 Configuring / Compiling / Installing
579 ------------------------------------
581 To configure, build and install collectd with the default settings, run
582 `./configure && make && make install'. For detailed, generic instructions
583 see INSTALL. For a complete list of configure options and their description,
584 run `./configure --help'.
586 By default, the configure script will check for all build dependencies and
587 disable all plugins whose requirements cannot be fulfilled (any other plugin
588 will be enabled). To enable a plugin, install missing dependencies (see
589 section `Prerequisites' above) and rerun `configure'. If you specify the
590 `--enable-<plugin>' configure option, the script will fail if the depen-
591 dencies for the specified plugin are not met. In that case you can force the
592 plugin to be built using the `--enable-<plugin>=force' configure option.
593 This will most likely fail though unless you're working in a very unusual
594 setup and you really know what you're doing. If you specify the
595 `--disable-<plugin>' configure option, the plugin will not be built. If you
596 specify the `--enable-all-plugins' or `--disable-all-plugins' configure
597 options, all plugins will be enabled or disabled respectively by default.
598 Explicitly enabling or disabling a plugin overwrites the default for the
599 specified plugin. These options are meant for package maintainers and should
600 not be used in everyday situations.
602 By default, collectd will be installed into `/opt/collectd'. You can adjust
603 this setting by specifying the `--prefix' configure option - see INSTALL for
604 details. If you pass DESTDIR=<path> to `make install', <path> will be
605 prefixed to all installation directories. This might be useful when creating
606 packages for collectd.
608 Configuring with libjvm
609 -----------------------
611 To determine the location of the required files of a Java installation is not
612 an easy task, because the locations vary with your kernel (Linux, SunOS, …)
613 and with your architecture (x86, SPARC, …) and there is no ‘java-config’
614 script we could use. Configuration of the JVM library is therefore a bit
617 The easiest way to use the `--with-java=$JAVA_HOME' option, where
618 `$JAVA_HOME' is usually something like:
619 /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0.14
621 The configure script will then use find(1) to look for the following files:
627 If found, appropriate CPP-flags and LD-flags are set and the following
628 library checks succeed.
630 If this doesn't work for you, you have the possibility to specify CPP-flags,
631 C-flags and LD-flags for the ‘Java’ plugin by hand, using the following three
632 (environment) variables:
638 For example (shortened for demonstration purposes):
640 ./configure JAVA_CPPFLAGS="-I$JAVA_HOME/include -I$JAVA_HOME/include/linux"
642 Adding "-ljvm" to the JAVA_LDFLAGS is done automatically, you don't have to
648 To compile correctly collectd needs to be able to initialize static
649 variables to NAN (Not A Number). Some C libraries, especially the GNU
650 libc, have a problem with that.
652 Luckily, with GCC it's possible to work around that problem: One can define
653 NAN as being (0.0 / 0.0) and `isnan' as `f != f'. However, to test this
654 ``implementation'' the configure script needs to compile and run a short
655 test program. Obviously running a test program when doing a cross-
656 compilation is, well, challenging.
658 If you run into this problem, you can use the `--with-nan-emulation'
659 configure option to force the use of this implementation. We can't promise
660 that the compiled binary actually behaves as it should, but since NANs
661 are likely never passed to the libm you have a good chance to be lucky.
663 Likewise, collectd needs to know the layout of doubles in memory, in order
664 to craft uniform network packets over different architectures. For this, it
665 needs to know how to convert doubles into the memory layout used by x86. The
666 configure script tries to figure this out by compiling and running a few
667 small test programs. This is of course not possible when cross-compiling.
668 You can use the `--with-fp-layout' option to tell the configure script which
669 conversion method to assume. Valid arguments are:
671 * `nothing' (12345678 -> 12345678)
672 * `endianflip' (12345678 -> 87654321)
673 * `intswap' (12345678 -> 56781234)
679 For questions, bug reports, development information and basically all other
680 concerns please send an email to collectd's mailing list at
681 <collectd at verplant.org>.
683 For live discussion and more personal contact visit us in IRC, we're in
684 channel #collectd on freenode.
690 Florian octo Forster <octo at verplant.org>,
691 Sebastian tokkee Harl <sh at tokkee.org>,
692 and many contributors (see `AUTHORS').
694 Please send bug reports and patches to the mailing list, see `Contact'
projects / collectd.git / blob