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 Network interface card statistics.
90 Values gathered by a custom program or script.
94 Count the number of files in directories.
97 Linux file-system based caching framework statistics.
100 Receive multicast traffic from Ganglia instances.
103 Harddisk temperatures using hddtempd.
106 Interface traffic: Number of octets, packets and errors for each
110 Iptables' counters: Number of bytes that were matched by a certain
114 IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) sensors information.
117 IPVS connection statistics (number of connections, octets and packets
118 for each service and destination).
119 See http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/software/index.html.
122 IRQ counters: Frequency in which certain interrupts occur.
125 Integrates a `Java Virtual Machine' (JVM) to execute plugins in Java
126 bytecode. See “Configuring with libjvm” below.
129 System load average over the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes.
132 Detailed CPU statistics of the “Logical Partitions” virtualization
133 technique built into IBM's POWER processors.
136 CPU, disk and network I/O statistics from virtual machines.
139 Queries very detailed usage statistics from wireless LAN adapters and
140 interfaces that use the Atheros chipset and the MadWifi driver.
143 Motherboard sensors: temperature, fanspeed and voltage information,
147 Linux software-RAID device information (number of active, failed, spare
151 Query and parse data from a memcache daemon (memcached).
154 Statistics of the memcached distributed caching system.
155 <http://www.danga.com/memcached/>
158 Memory utilization: Memory occupied by running processes, page cache,
159 buffer cache and free.
162 Reads values from Modbus/TCP enabled devices. Supports reading values
163 from multiple "slaves" so gateway devices can be used.
166 Information provided by serial multimeters, such as the `Metex
170 MySQL server statistics: Commands issued, handlers triggered, thread
171 usage, query cache utilization and traffic/octets sent and received.
174 Plugin to query performance values from a NetApp storage system using the
175 “Manage ONTAP” SDK provided by NetApp.
178 Very detailed Linux network interface and routing statistics. You can get
179 (detailed) information on interfaces, qdiscs, classes, and, if you can
180 make use of it, filters.
183 Receive values that were collected by other hosts. Large setups will
184 want to collect the data on one dedicated machine, and this is the
185 plugin of choice for that.
188 NFS Procedures: Which NFS command were called how often. Only NFSv2 and
192 Collects statistics from `nginx' (speak: engine X), a HTTP and mail
196 NTP daemon statistics: Local clock drift, offset to peers, etc.
199 Network UPS tools: UPS current, voltage, power, charge, utilisation,
200 temperature, etc. See upsd(8).
203 Information about Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA).
206 Queries routing information from the “Optimized Link State Routing”
209 - onewire (EXPERIMENTAL!)
210 Read onewire sensors using the owcapu library of the owfs project.
211 Please read in collectd.conf(5) why this plugin is experimental.
214 RX and TX of each client in openvpn-status.log (status-version 2).
215 <http://openvpn.net/index.php/documentation/howto.html>
218 Query data from an Oracle database.
221 The perl plugin implements a Perl-interpreter into collectd. You can
222 write your own plugins in Perl and return arbitrary values using this
223 API. See collectd-perl(5).
226 Receive and dispatch timing values from Pinba, a profiling extension for
230 Network latency: Time to reach the default gateway or another given
234 PostgreSQL database statistics: active server connections, transaction
235 numbers, block IO, table row manipulations.
238 PowerDNS name server statistics.
241 Process counts: Number of running, sleeping, zombie, ... processes.
244 Counts various aspects of network protocols such as IP, TCP, UDP, etc.
247 The python plugin implements a Python interpreter into collectd. This
248 makes it possible to write plugins in Python which are executed by
249 collectd without the need to start a heavy interpreter every interval.
250 See collectd-python(5) for details.
253 The redis plugin gathers information from a redis server, including:
254 uptime, used memory, total connections etc.
257 Query interface and wireless registration statistics from RouterOS.
260 RRDtool caching daemon (RRDcacheD) statistics.
263 System sensors, accessed using lm_sensors: Voltages, temperatures and
267 RX and TX of serial interfaces. Linux only; needs root privileges.
270 Read values from SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) enabled
271 network devices such as switches, routers, thermometers, rack monitoring
272 servers, etc. See collectd-snmp(5).
275 Pages swapped out onto harddisk or whatever is called `swap' by the OS..
278 Parse table-like structured files.
281 Follows (tails) logfiles, parses them by lines and submits matched
285 Bytes and operations read and written on tape devices. Solaris only.
288 Number of TCP connections to specific local and remote ports.
291 TeamSpeak2 server statistics.
294 Plugin to read values from `The Energy Detective' (TED).
297 Linux ACPI thermal zone information.
300 Reads the number of records and file size from a running Tokyo Tyrant
304 System uptime statistics.
307 Users currently logged in.
310 Various statistics from Varnish, an HTTP accelerator.
313 Virtual memory statistics, e. g. the number of page-ins/-outs or the
314 number of pagefaults.
317 System resources used by Linux VServers.
318 See <http://linux-vserver.org/>.
321 Link quality of wireless cards. Linux only.
324 Bitrate and frequency of music played with XMMS.
327 Statistics for ZFS' “Adaptive Replacement Cache” (ARC).
329 * Output can be written or sent to various destinations by the following
333 Sends JSON-encoded data to an Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP)
334 server, such as RabbitMQ.
337 Write to comma separated values (CSV) files. This needs lots of
338 diskspace but is extremely portable and can be analysed with almost
339 every program that can analyse anything. Even Microsoft's Excel..
342 Send the data to a remote host to save the data somehow. This is useful
343 for large setups where the data should be saved by a dedicated machine.
346 Of course the values are propagated to plugins written in Perl, too, so
347 you can easily do weird stuff with the plugins we didn't dare think of
348 ;) See collectd-perl(5).
351 It's possible to implement write plugins in Python using the python
352 plugin. See collectd-python(5) for details.
355 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using the RRDtool caching
356 daemon (RRDcacheD) - see rrdcached(1). That daemon provides a general
357 implementation of the caching done by the `rrdtool' plugin.
360 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using librrd. See rrdtool(1).
361 This is likely the most popular destination for such values. Since
362 updates to RRD-files are somewhat expensive this plugin can cache
363 updates to the files and write a bunch of updates at once, which lessens
367 One can query the values from the unixsock plugin whenever they're
368 needed. Please read collectd-unixsock(5) for a description on how that's
372 Sends data to Carbon, the storage layer of Graphite.
375 Sends the values collected by collectd to a web-server using HTTP POST
376 requests. The transmitted data is either in a form understood by the
377 Exec plugin or formatted in JSON.
380 Sends the values to a Redis key-value database server.
382 * Logging is, as everything in collectd, provided by plugins. The following
383 plugins keep up informed about what's going on:
386 Writes logmessages to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
389 Log messages are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
390 See collectd-perl(5).
393 It's possible to implement log plugins in Python using the python plugin.
394 See collectd-python(5) for details.
397 Logs to the standard UNIX logging mechanism, syslog.
399 * Notifications can be handled by the following plugins:
402 Send a desktop notification to a notification daemon, as defined in
403 the Desktop Notification Specification. To actually display the
404 notifications, notification-daemon is required.
405 See http://www.galago-project.org/specs/notification/.
408 Send an E-mail with the notification message to the configured
412 Execute a program or script to handle the notification.
413 See collectd-exec(5).
416 Writes the notification message to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
419 Send the notification to a remote host to handle it somehow.
422 Notifications are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
423 See collectd-perl(5).
426 It's possible to implement notification plugins in Python using the
427 python plugin. See collectd-python(5) for details.
429 * Value processing can be controlled using the "filter chain" infrastructure
430 and "matches" and "targets". The following plugins are available:
432 - match_empty_counter
433 Match counter values which are currently zero.
436 Match values using a hash function of the hostname.
439 Match values by their identifier based on regular expressions.
442 Match values with an invalid timestamp.
445 Select values by their data sources' values.
447 - target_notification
448 Create and dispatch a notification.
451 Replace parts of an identifier using regular expressions.
454 Scale (multiply) values by an arbitrary value.
457 Set (overwrite) entire parts of an identifier.
459 * Miscellaneous plugins:
462 Checks values against configured thresholds and creates notifications if
463 values are out of bounds. See collectd-threshold(5) for details.
466 Sets the hostname to an unique identifier. This is meant for setups
467 where each client may migrate to another physical host, possibly going
468 through one or more name changes in the process.
470 * Performance: Since collectd is running as a daemon it doesn't spend much
471 time starting up again and again. With the exception of the exec plugin no
472 processes are forked. Caching in output plugins, such as the rrdtool and
473 network plugins, makes sure your resources are used efficiently. Also,
474 since collectd is programmed multithreaded it benefits from hyperthreading
475 and multicore processors and makes sure that the daemon isn't idle if only
476 one plugin waits for an IO-operation to complete.
478 * Once set up, hardly any maintenance is necessary. Setup is kept as easy
479 as possible and the default values should be okay for most users.
485 * collectd's configuration file can be found at `sysconfdir'/collectd.conf.
486 Run `collectd -h' for a list of builtin defaults. See `collectd.conf(5)'
487 for a list of options and a syntax description.
489 * When the `csv' or `rrdtool' plugins are loaded they'll write the values to
490 files. The usual place for these files is beneath `/var/lib/collectd'.
492 * When using some of the plugins, collectd needs to run as user root, since
493 only root can do certain things, such as craft ICMP packages needed to ping
494 other hosts. collectd should NOT be installed setuid root since it can be
495 used to overwrite valuable files!
497 * Sample scripts to generate graphs reside in `contrib/' in the source
498 package or somewhere near `/usr/share/doc/collectd' in most distributions.
499 Please be aware that those script are meant as a starting point for your
500 own experiments.. Some of them require the `RRDs' Perl module.
501 (`librrds-perl' on Debian) If you have written a more sophisticated
502 solution please share it with us.
504 * The RRAs of the automatically created RRD files depend on the `step'
505 and `heartbeat' settings given. If change these settings you may need to
506 re-create the files, losing all data. Please be aware of that when changing
507 the values and read the rrdtool(1) manpage thoroughly.
510 collectd and chkrootkit
511 -----------------------
513 If you are using the `dns' plugin chkrootkit(1) will report collectd as a
514 packet sniffer ("<iface>: PACKET SNIFFER(/usr/sbin/collectd[<pid>])"). The
515 plugin captures all UDP packets on port 53 to analyze the DNS traffic. In
516 this case, collectd is a legitimate sniffer and the report should be
517 considered to be a false positive. However, you might want to check that
518 this really is collectd and not some other, illegitimate sniffer.
524 To compile collectd from source you will need:
526 * Usual suspects: C compiler, linker, preprocessor, make, ...
528 * A POSIX-threads (pthread) implementation.
529 Since gathering some statistics is slow (network connections, slow devices,
530 etc) the collectd is parallelized. The POSIX threads interface is being
531 used and should be found in various implementations for hopefully all
534 * CoreFoundation.framework and IOKit.framework (optional)
535 For compiling on Darwin in general and the `apple_sensors' plugin in
537 <http://developer.apple.com/corefoundation/>
539 * libclntsh (optional)
540 Used by the `oracle' plugin.
542 * libcredis (optional)
543 Used by the redis plugin. Please note that you require a 0.2.2 version
544 or higher. <http://code.google.com/p/credis/>
547 If you want to use the `apache', `ascent', `curl', `nginx', or `write_http'
549 <http://curl.haxx.se/>
552 Used by the `dbi' plugin to connect to various databases.
553 <http://libdbi.sourceforge.net/>
555 * libesmtp (optional)
556 For the `notify_email' plugin.
557 <http://www.stafford.uklinux.net/libesmtp/>
559 * libganglia (optional)
560 Used by the `gmond' plugin to process data received from Ganglia.
561 <http://ganglia.info/>
563 * libgcrypt (optional)
564 Used by the `network' plugin for encryption and authentication.
565 <http://www.gnupg.org/>
568 If present, the uuid plugin will check for UUID from HAL.
569 <http://hal.freedesktop.org/>
572 For querying iptables counters.
573 <http://netfilter.org/>
575 If not found on the system, a version shipped with this distribution can
576 be used. It requires some Linux headers in /usr/include/linux. You can
577 force the build system to use the shipped version by specifying
578 --with-libiptc=shipped
579 when running the configure script.
582 Library that encapsulates the `Java Virtual Machine' (JVM). This library is
583 used by the Java plugin to execute Java bytecode. See “Configuring with
585 <http://openjdk.java.net/> (and others)
587 * libmemcached (optional)
588 Used by the `memcachec' plugin to connect to a memcache daemon.
589 <http://tangent.org/552/libmemcached.html>
591 * libmodbus (optional)
592 Used by the “modbus” plugin to communicate with Modbus/TCP devices. The
593 “modbus” plugin works with version 2.0.3 of the library – due to frequent
594 API changes other versions may or may not compile cleanly.
595 <http://www.libmodbus.org/>
597 * libmysqlclient (optional)
598 Unsurprisingly used by the `mysql' plugin.
599 <http://dev.mysql.com/>
601 * libnetapp (optional)
602 Required for the “netapp” plugin.
603 This library is part of the “Manage ONTAP SDK” published by NetApp.
605 * libnetlink (optional)
606 Used, obviously, for the `netlink' plugin.
607 <http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Net:Iproute2>
609 * libnetsnmp (optional)
610 For the `snmp' plugin.
611 <http://www.net-snmp.org/>
613 * libnotify (optional)
614 For the `notify_desktop' plugin.
615 <http://www.galago-project.org/>
617 * liboping (optional)
618 Used by the `ping' plugin to send and receive ICMP packets.
619 <http://verplant.org/liboping/>
621 * libowcapi (optional)
622 Used by the `onewire' plugin to read values from onewire sensors (or the
624 <http://www.owfs.org/>
627 Used to capture packets by the `dns' plugin.
628 <http://www.tcpdump.org/>
630 * libperfstat (optional)
631 Used by various plugins to gather statistics under AIX.
634 Obviously used by the `perl' plugin. The library has to be compiled with
635 ithread support (introduced in Perl 5.6.0).
636 <http://www.perl.org/>
639 The PostgreSQL C client library used by the `postgresql' plugin.
640 <http://www.postgresql.org/>
642 * libprotobuf-c, protoc-c (optional)
643 Used by the `pinba' plugin to generate a parser for the network packets
644 sent by the Pinba PHP extension.
645 <http://code.google.com/p/protobuf-c/>
647 * libpython (optional)
648 Used by the `python' plugin. Currently, Python 2.3 and later and Python 3
650 <http://www.python.org/>
652 * librabbitmq (optional; also called “rabbitmq-c”)
653 Used by the AMQP plugin for AMQP connections, for example to RabbitMQ.
654 <http://hg.rabbitmq.com/rabbitmq-c/>
656 * librouteros (optional)
657 Used by the `routeros' plugin to connect to a device running `RouterOS'.
658 <http://verplant.org/librouteros/>
661 Used by the `rrdtool' and `rrdcached' plugins. The latter requires RRDtool
662 client support which was added after version 1.3 of RRDtool. Versions 1.0,
663 1.2 and 1.3 are known to work with the `rrdtool' plugin.
664 <http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/>
666 * librt, libsocket, libkstat, libdevinfo (optional)
667 Various standard Solaris libraries which provide system functions.
668 <http://developers.sun.com/solaris/>
670 * libsensors (optional)
671 To read from `lm_sensors', see the `sensors' plugin.
672 <http://www.lm-sensors.org/>
674 * libstatgrab (optional)
675 Used by various plugins to collect statistics on systems other than Linux
677 <http://www.i-scream.org/libstatgrab/>
679 * libtokyotyrant (optional)
680 Used by the tokyotyrant plugin.
681 <http://1978th.net/tokyotyrant/>
683 * libupsclient/nut (optional)
684 For the `nut' plugin which queries nut's `upsd'.
685 <http://networkupstools.org/>
688 Collect statistics from virtual machines.
689 <http://libvirt.org/>
692 Parse XML data. This is needed for the `ascent' and `libvirt' plugins.
693 <http://xmlsoft.org/>
696 <http://www.xmms.org/>
699 Parse JSON data. This is needed for the `curl_json' plugin.
700 <http://github.com/lloyd/yajl>
702 * libvarnish (optional)
703 Fetches statistics from a Varnish instance. This is needed for the Varnish plugin
704 <http://varnish-cache.org>
706 Configuring / Compiling / Installing
707 ------------------------------------
709 To configure, build and install collectd with the default settings, run
710 `./configure && make && make install'. For detailed, generic instructions
711 see INSTALL. For a complete list of configure options and their description,
712 run `./configure --help'.
714 By default, the configure script will check for all build dependencies and
715 disable all plugins whose requirements cannot be fulfilled (any other plugin
716 will be enabled). To enable a plugin, install missing dependencies (see
717 section `Prerequisites' above) and rerun `configure'. If you specify the
718 `--enable-<plugin>' configure option, the script will fail if the depen-
719 dencies for the specified plugin are not met. In that case you can force the
720 plugin to be built using the `--enable-<plugin>=force' configure option.
721 This will most likely fail though unless you're working in a very unusual
722 setup and you really know what you're doing. If you specify the
723 `--disable-<plugin>' configure option, the plugin will not be built. If you
724 specify the `--enable-all-plugins' or `--disable-all-plugins' configure
725 options, all plugins will be enabled or disabled respectively by default.
726 Explicitly enabling or disabling a plugin overwrites the default for the
727 specified plugin. These options are meant for package maintainers and should
728 not be used in everyday situations.
730 By default, collectd will be installed into `/opt/collectd'. You can adjust
731 this setting by specifying the `--prefix' configure option - see INSTALL for
732 details. If you pass DESTDIR=<path> to `make install', <path> will be
733 prefixed to all installation directories. This might be useful when creating
734 packages for collectd.
736 Configuring with libjvm
737 -----------------------
739 To determine the location of the required files of a Java installation is not
740 an easy task, because the locations vary with your kernel (Linux, SunOS, …)
741 and with your architecture (x86, SPARC, …) and there is no ‘java-config’
742 script we could use. Configuration of the JVM library is therefore a bit
745 The easiest way to use the `--with-java=$JAVA_HOME' option, where
746 `$JAVA_HOME' is usually something like:
747 /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0.14
749 The configure script will then use find(1) to look for the following files:
755 If found, appropriate CPP-flags and LD-flags are set and the following
756 library checks succeed.
758 If this doesn't work for you, you have the possibility to specify CPP-flags,
759 C-flags and LD-flags for the ‘Java’ plugin by hand, using the following three
760 (environment) variables:
766 For example (shortened for demonstration purposes):
768 ./configure JAVA_CPPFLAGS="-I$JAVA_HOME/include -I$JAVA_HOME/include/linux"
770 Adding "-ljvm" to the JAVA_LDFLAGS is done automatically, you don't have to
776 To compile correctly collectd needs to be able to initialize static
777 variables to NAN (Not A Number). Some C libraries, especially the GNU
778 libc, have a problem with that.
780 Luckily, with GCC it's possible to work around that problem: One can define
781 NAN as being (0.0 / 0.0) and `isnan' as `f != f'. However, to test this
782 ``implementation'' the configure script needs to compile and run a short
783 test program. Obviously running a test program when doing a cross-
784 compilation is, well, challenging.
786 If you run into this problem, you can use the `--with-nan-emulation'
787 configure option to force the use of this implementation. We can't promise
788 that the compiled binary actually behaves as it should, but since NANs
789 are likely never passed to the libm you have a good chance to be lucky.
791 Likewise, collectd needs to know the layout of doubles in memory, in order
792 to craft uniform network packets over different architectures. For this, it
793 needs to know how to convert doubles into the memory layout used by x86. The
794 configure script tries to figure this out by compiling and running a few
795 small test programs. This is of course not possible when cross-compiling.
796 You can use the `--with-fp-layout' option to tell the configure script which
797 conversion method to assume. Valid arguments are:
799 * `nothing' (12345678 -> 12345678)
800 * `endianflip' (12345678 -> 87654321)
801 * `intswap' (12345678 -> 56781234)
807 For questions, bug reports, development information and basically all other
808 concerns please send an email to collectd's mailing list at
809 <collectd at verplant.org>.
811 For live discussion and more personal contact visit us in IRC, we're in
812 channel #collectd on freenode.
818 Florian octo Forster <octo at verplant.org>,
819 Sebastian tokkee Harl <sh at tokkee.org>,
820 and many contributors (see `AUTHORS').
822 Please send bug reports and patches to the mailing list, see `Contact'
projects / collectd.git / blob