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 Query and parse data from a memcache daemon (memcached).
147 Statistics of the memcached distributed caching system.
148 <http://www.danga.com/memcached/>
151 Memory utilization: Memory occupied by running processes, page cache,
152 buffer cache and free.
155 Reads values from Modbus/TCP enabled devices. Supports reading values
156 from multiple "slaves" so gateway devices can be used.
159 Information provided by serial multimeters, such as the `Metex
163 MySQL server statistics: Commands issued, handlers triggered, thread
164 usage, query cache utilization and traffic/octets sent and received.
167 Plugin to query performance values from a NetApp storage system using the
168 “Manage ONTAP” SDK provided by NetApp.
171 Very detailed Linux network interface and routing statistics. You can get
172 (detailed) information on interfaces, qdiscs, classes, and, if you can
173 make use of it, filters.
176 Receive values that were collected by other hosts. Large setups will
177 want to collect the data on one dedicated machine, and this is the
178 plugin of choice for that.
181 NFS Procedures: Which NFS command were called how often. Only NFSv2 and
185 Collects statistics from `nginx' (speak: engine X), a HTTP and mail
189 NTP daemon statistics: Local clock drift, offset to peers, etc.
192 Network UPS tools: UPS current, voltage, power, charge, utilisation,
193 temperature, etc. See upsd(8).
196 Queries routing information from the “Optimized Link State Routing”
199 - onewire (EXPERIMENTAL!)
200 Read onewire sensors using the owcapu library of the owfs project.
201 Please read in collectd.conf(5) why this plugin is experimental.
204 RX and TX of each client in openvpn-status.log (status-version 2).
205 <http://openvpn.net/index.php/documentation/howto.html>
208 Query data from an Oracle database.
211 The perl plugin implements a Perl-interpreter into collectd. You can
212 write your own plugins in Perl and return arbitrary values using this
213 API. See collectd-perl(5).
216 Receive and dispatch timing values from Pinba, a profiling extension for
220 Network latency: Time to reach the default gateway or another given
224 PostgreSQL database statistics: active server connections, transaction
225 numbers, block IO, table row manipulations.
228 PowerDNS name server statistics.
231 Process counts: Number of running, sleeping, zombie, ... processes.
234 Counts various aspects of network protocols such as IP, TCP, UDP, etc.
237 The python plugin implements a Python interpreter into collectd. This
238 makes it possible to write plugins in Python which are executed by
239 collectd without the need to start a heavy interpreter every interval.
240 See collectd-python(5) for details.
243 The redis plugin gathers information from a redis server, including:
244 uptime, used memory, total connections etc.
247 Query interface and wireless registration statistics from RouterOS.
250 RRDtool caching daemon (RRDcacheD) statistics.
253 System sensors, accessed using lm_sensors: Voltages, temperatures and
257 RX and TX of serial interfaces. Linux only; needs root privileges.
260 Read values from SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) enabled
261 network devices such as switches, routers, thermometers, rack monitoring
262 servers, etc. See collectd-snmp(5).
265 Pages swapped out onto harddisk or whatever is called `swap' by the OS..
268 Parse table-like structured files.
271 Follows (tails) logfiles, parses them by lines and submits matched
275 Bytes and operations read and written on tape devices. Solaris only.
278 Number of TCP connections to specific local and remote ports.
281 TeamSpeak2 server statistics.
284 Plugin to read values from `The Energy Detective' (TED).
287 Linux ACPI thermal zone information.
290 Reads the number of records and file size from a running Tokyo Tyrant
294 System uptime statistics.
297 Users currently logged in.
300 Various statistics from Varnish, an HTTP accelerator.
303 Virtual memory statistics, e. g. the number of page-ins/-outs or the
304 number of pagefaults.
307 System resources used by Linux VServers.
308 See <http://linux-vserver.org/>.
311 Link quality of wireless cards. Linux only.
314 Bitrate and frequency of music played with XMMS.
317 Statistics for ZFS' “Adaptive Replacement Cache” (ARC).
319 * Output can be written or sent to various destinations by the following
323 Sends JSON-encoded data to an Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP)
324 server, such as RabbitMQ.
327 Write to comma separated values (CSV) files. This needs lots of
328 diskspace but is extremely portable and can be analysed with almost
329 every program that can analyse anything. Even Microsoft's Excel..
332 Send the data to a remote host to save the data somehow. This is useful
333 for large setups where the data should be saved by a dedicated machine.
336 Of course the values are propagated to plugins written in Perl, too, so
337 you can easily do weird stuff with the plugins we didn't dare think of
338 ;) See collectd-perl(5).
341 It's possible to implement write plugins in Python using the python
342 plugin. See collectd-python(5) for details.
345 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using the RRDtool caching
346 daemon (RRDcacheD) - see rrdcached(1). That daemon provides a general
347 implementation of the caching done by the `rrdtool' plugin.
350 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using librrd. See rrdtool(1).
351 This is likely the most popular destination for such values. Since
352 updates to RRD-files are somewhat expensive this plugin can cache
353 updates to the files and write a bunch of updates at once, which lessens
357 One can query the values from the unixsock plugin whenever they're
358 needed. Please read collectd-unixsock(5) for a description on how that's
362 Sends the values collected by collectd to a web-server using HTTP POST
363 requests. The transmitted data is either in a form understood by the
364 Exec plugin or formatted in JSON.
366 * Logging is, as everything in collectd, provided by plugins. The following
367 plugins keep up informed about what's going on:
370 Writes logmessages to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
373 Log messages are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
374 See collectd-perl(5).
377 It's possible to implement log plugins in Python using the python plugin.
378 See collectd-python(5) for details.
381 Logs to the standard UNIX logging mechanism, syslog.
383 * Notifications can be handled by the following plugins:
386 Send a desktop notification to a notification daemon, as defined in
387 the Desktop Notification Specification. To actually display the
388 notifications, notification-daemon is required.
389 See http://www.galago-project.org/specs/notification/.
392 Send an E-mail with the notification message to the configured
396 Execute a program or script to handle the notification.
397 See collectd-exec(5).
400 Writes the notification message to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
403 Send the notification to a remote host to handle it somehow.
406 Notifications are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
407 See collectd-perl(5).
410 It's possible to implement notification plugins in Python using the
411 python plugin. See collectd-python(5) for details.
413 * Value processing can be controlled using the "filter chain" infrastructure
414 and "matches" and "targets". The following plugins are available:
416 - match_empty_counter
417 Match counter values which are currently zero.
420 Match values using a hash function of the hostname.
423 Match values by their identifier based on regular expressions.
426 Match values with an invalid timestamp.
429 Select values by their data sources' values.
431 - target_notification
432 Create and dispatch a notification.
435 Replace parts of an identifier using regular expressions.
438 Scale (multiply) values by an arbitrary value.
441 Set (overwrite) entire parts of an identifier.
443 * Miscellaneous plugins:
446 Sets the hostname to an unique identifier. This is meant for setups
447 where each client may migrate to another physical host, possibly going
448 through one or more name changes in the process.
450 * Performance: Since collectd is running as a daemon it doesn't spend much
451 time starting up again and again. With the exception of the exec plugin no
452 processes are forked. Caching in output plugins, such as the rrdtool and
453 network plugins, makes sure your resources are used efficiently. Also,
454 since collectd is programmed multithreaded it benefits from hyperthreading
455 and multicore processors and makes sure that the daemon isn't idle if only
456 one plugin waits for an IO-operation to complete.
458 * Once set up, hardly any maintenance is necessary. Setup is kept as easy
459 as possible and the default values should be okay for most users.
465 * collectd's configuration file can be found at `sysconfdir'/collectd.conf.
466 Run `collectd -h' for a list of builtin defaults. See `collectd.conf(5)'
467 for a list of options and a syntax description.
469 * When the `csv' or `rrdtool' plugins are loaded they'll write the values to
470 files. The usual place for these files is beneath `/var/lib/collectd'.
472 * When using some of the plugins, collectd needs to run as user root, since
473 only root can do certain things, such as craft ICMP packages needed to ping
474 other hosts. collectd should NOT be installed setuid root since it can be
475 used to overwrite valuable files!
477 * Sample scripts to generate graphs reside in `contrib/' in the source
478 package or somewhere near `/usr/share/doc/collectd' in most distributions.
479 Please be aware that those script are meant as a starting point for your
480 own experiments.. Some of them require the `RRDs' Perl module.
481 (`librrds-perl' on Debian) If you have written a more sophisticated
482 solution please share it with us.
484 * The RRAs of the automatically created RRD files depend on the `step'
485 and `heartbeat' settings given. If change these settings you may need to
486 re-create the files, losing all data. Please be aware of that when changing
487 the values and read the rrdtool(1) manpage thoroughly.
490 collectd and chkrootkit
491 -----------------------
493 If you are using the `dns' plugin chkrootkit(1) will report collectd as a
494 packet sniffer ("<iface>: PACKET SNIFFER(/usr/sbin/collectd[<pid>])"). The
495 plugin captures all UDP packets on port 53 to analyze the DNS traffic. In
496 this case, collectd is a legitimate sniffer and the report should be
497 considered to be a false positive. However, you might want to check that
498 this really is collectd and not some other, illegitimate sniffer.
504 To compile collectd from source you will need:
506 * Usual suspects: C compiler, linker, preprocessor, make, ...
508 * A POSIX-threads (pthread) implementation.
509 Since gathering some statistics is slow (network connections, slow devices,
510 etc) the collectd is parallelized. The POSIX threads interface is being
511 used and should be found in various implementations for hopefully all
514 * CoreFoundation.framework and IOKit.framework (optional)
515 For compiling on Darwin in general and the `apple_sensors' plugin in
517 <http://developer.apple.com/corefoundation/>
519 * libclntsh (optional)
520 Used by the `oracle' plugin.
522 * libcredis (optional)
523 Used by the redis plugin. Please note that you require a 0.2.2 version
524 or higher. <http://code.google.com/p/credis/>
527 If you want to use the `apache', `ascent', `curl', `nginx', or `write_http'
529 <http://curl.haxx.se/>
532 Used by the `dbi' plugin to connect to various databases.
533 <http://libdbi.sourceforge.net/>
535 * libesmtp (optional)
536 For the `notify_email' plugin.
537 <http://www.stafford.uklinux.net/libesmtp/>
539 * libganglia (optional)
540 Used by the `gmond' plugin to process data received from Ganglia.
541 <http://ganglia.info/>
543 * libgcrypt (optional)
544 Used by the `network' plugin for encryption and authentication.
545 <http://www.gnupg.org/>
548 If present, the uuid plugin will check for UUID from HAL.
549 <http://hal.freedesktop.org/>
552 For querying iptables counters.
553 <http://netfilter.org/>
555 If not found on the system, a version shipped with this distribution can
556 be used. It requires some Linux headers in /usr/include/linux. You can
557 force the build system to use the shipped version by specifying
558 --with-libiptc=shipped
559 when running the configure script.
562 Library that encapsulates the `Java Virtual Machine' (JVM). This library is
563 used by the Java plugin to execute Java bytecode. See “Configuring with
565 <http://openjdk.java.net/> (and others)
567 * libmemcached (optional)
568 Used by the `memcachec' plugin to connect to a memcache daemon.
569 <http://tangent.org/552/libmemcached.html>
571 * libmodbus (optional)
572 Used by the `modbus' plugin to communicate with Modbus/TCP devices.
573 <https://launchpad.net/libmodbus>
575 * libmysqlclient (optional)
576 Unsurprisingly used by the `mysql' plugin.
577 <http://dev.mysql.com/>
579 * libnetapp (optional)
580 Required for the “netapp” plugin.
581 This library is part of the “Manage ONTAP SDK” published by NetApp.
583 * libnetlink (optional)
584 Used, obviously, for the `netlink' plugin.
585 <http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Net:Iproute2>
587 * libnetsnmp (optional)
588 For the `snmp' plugin.
589 <http://www.net-snmp.org/>
591 * libnotify (optional)
592 For the `notify_desktop' plugin.
593 <http://www.galago-project.org/>
595 * liboping (optional)
596 Used by the `ping' plugin to send and receive ICMP packets.
597 <http://verplant.org/liboping/>
599 * libowcapi (optional)
600 Used by the `onewire' plugin to read values from onewire sensors (or the
602 <http://www.owfs.org/>
605 Used to capture packets by the `dns' plugin.
606 <http://www.tcpdump.org/>
609 Obviously used by the `perl' plugin. The library has to be compiled with
610 ithread support (introduced in Perl 5.6.0).
611 <http://www.perl.org/>
614 The PostgreSQL C client library used by the `postgresql' plugin.
615 <http://www.postgresql.org/>
617 * libprotobuf-c, protoc-c (optional)
618 Used by the `pinba' plugin to generate a parser for the network packets
619 sent by the Pinba PHP extension.
620 <http://code.google.com/p/protobuf-c/>
622 * libpython (optional)
623 Used by the `python' plugin. Currently, only 2.3 ≦ Python < 3 is supported.
624 <http://www.python.org/>
626 * librabbitmq (optional; also called “rabbitmq-c”)
627 Used by the AMQP plugin for AMQP connections, for example to RabbitMQ.
628 <http://hg.rabbitmq.com/rabbitmq-c/>
630 * librouteros (optional)
631 Used by the `routeros' plugin to connect to a device running `RouterOS'.
632 <http://verplant.org/librouteros/>
635 Used by the `rrdtool' and `rrdcached' plugins. The latter requires RRDtool
636 client support which was added after version 1.3 of RRDtool. Versions 1.0,
637 1.2 and 1.3 are known to work with the `rrdtool' plugin.
638 <http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/>
640 * librt, libsocket, libkstat, libdevinfo (optional)
641 Various standard Solaris libraries which provide system functions.
642 <http://developers.sun.com/solaris/>
644 * libsensors (optional)
645 To read from `lm_sensors', see the `sensors' plugin.
646 <http://www.lm-sensors.org/>
648 * libstatgrab (optional)
649 Used by various plugins to collect statistics on systems other than Linux
651 <http://www.i-scream.org/libstatgrab/>
653 * libtokyotyrant (optional)
654 Used by the tokyotyrant plugin.
655 <http://1978th.net/tokyotyrant/>
657 * libupsclient/nut (optional)
658 For the `nut' plugin which queries nut's `upsd'.
659 <http://networkupstools.org/>
662 Collect statistics from virtual machines.
663 <http://libvirt.org/>
666 Parse XML data. This is needed for the `ascent' and `libvirt' plugins.
667 <http://xmlsoft.org/>
670 <http://www.xmms.org/>
673 Parse JSON data. This is needed for the `curl_json' plugin.
674 <http://github.com/lloyd/yajl>
676 * libvarnish (optional)
677 Fetches statistics from a Varnish instance. This is needed for the Varnish plugin
678 <http://varnish-cache.org>
680 Configuring / Compiling / Installing
681 ------------------------------------
683 To configure, build and install collectd with the default settings, run
684 `./configure && make && make install'. For detailed, generic instructions
685 see INSTALL. For a complete list of configure options and their description,
686 run `./configure --help'.
688 By default, the configure script will check for all build dependencies and
689 disable all plugins whose requirements cannot be fulfilled (any other plugin
690 will be enabled). To enable a plugin, install missing dependencies (see
691 section `Prerequisites' above) and rerun `configure'. If you specify the
692 `--enable-<plugin>' configure option, the script will fail if the depen-
693 dencies for the specified plugin are not met. In that case you can force the
694 plugin to be built using the `--enable-<plugin>=force' configure option.
695 This will most likely fail though unless you're working in a very unusual
696 setup and you really know what you're doing. If you specify the
697 `--disable-<plugin>' configure option, the plugin will not be built. If you
698 specify the `--enable-all-plugins' or `--disable-all-plugins' configure
699 options, all plugins will be enabled or disabled respectively by default.
700 Explicitly enabling or disabling a plugin overwrites the default for the
701 specified plugin. These options are meant for package maintainers and should
702 not be used in everyday situations.
704 By default, collectd will be installed into `/opt/collectd'. You can adjust
705 this setting by specifying the `--prefix' configure option - see INSTALL for
706 details. If you pass DESTDIR=<path> to `make install', <path> will be
707 prefixed to all installation directories. This might be useful when creating
708 packages for collectd.
710 Configuring with libjvm
711 -----------------------
713 To determine the location of the required files of a Java installation is not
714 an easy task, because the locations vary with your kernel (Linux, SunOS, …)
715 and with your architecture (x86, SPARC, …) and there is no ‘java-config’
716 script we could use. Configuration of the JVM library is therefore a bit
719 The easiest way to use the `--with-java=$JAVA_HOME' option, where
720 `$JAVA_HOME' is usually something like:
721 /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0.14
723 The configure script will then use find(1) to look for the following files:
729 If found, appropriate CPP-flags and LD-flags are set and the following
730 library checks succeed.
732 If this doesn't work for you, you have the possibility to specify CPP-flags,
733 C-flags and LD-flags for the ‘Java’ plugin by hand, using the following three
734 (environment) variables:
740 For example (shortened for demonstration purposes):
742 ./configure JAVA_CPPFLAGS="-I$JAVA_HOME/include -I$JAVA_HOME/include/linux"
744 Adding "-ljvm" to the JAVA_LDFLAGS is done automatically, you don't have to
750 To compile correctly collectd needs to be able to initialize static
751 variables to NAN (Not A Number). Some C libraries, especially the GNU
752 libc, have a problem with that.
754 Luckily, with GCC it's possible to work around that problem: One can define
755 NAN as being (0.0 / 0.0) and `isnan' as `f != f'. However, to test this
756 ``implementation'' the configure script needs to compile and run a short
757 test program. Obviously running a test program when doing a cross-
758 compilation is, well, challenging.
760 If you run into this problem, you can use the `--with-nan-emulation'
761 configure option to force the use of this implementation. We can't promise
762 that the compiled binary actually behaves as it should, but since NANs
763 are likely never passed to the libm you have a good chance to be lucky.
765 Likewise, collectd needs to know the layout of doubles in memory, in order
766 to craft uniform network packets over different architectures. For this, it
767 needs to know how to convert doubles into the memory layout used by x86. The
768 configure script tries to figure this out by compiling and running a few
769 small test programs. This is of course not possible when cross-compiling.
770 You can use the `--with-fp-layout' option to tell the configure script which
771 conversion method to assume. Valid arguments are:
773 * `nothing' (12345678 -> 12345678)
774 * `endianflip' (12345678 -> 87654321)
775 * `intswap' (12345678 -> 56781234)
781 For questions, bug reports, development information and basically all other
782 concerns please send an email to collectd's mailing list at
783 <collectd at verplant.org>.
785 For live discussion and more personal contact visit us in IRC, we're in
786 channel #collectd on freenode.
792 Florian octo Forster <octo at verplant.org>,
793 Sebastian tokkee Harl <sh at tokkee.org>,
794 and many contributors (see `AUTHORS').
796 Please send bug reports and patches to the mailing list, see `Contact'
projects / collectd.git / blob