About
-----
- collectd is a small daemon which collects statistics about a computer's
- usage and writes then into RRD files.
+ collectd is a small daemon which collects system information periodically
+ and provides mechanisms to store and monitor the values in a variety of
+ ways.
Features
voltage sensors.
- battery
- Batterycharge, -current and volatage of ACPI and PMU based laptop
+ Batterycharge, -current and voltage of ACPI and PMU based laptop
batteries.
- cpu
Iptables' counters: Number of bytes that were matched by a certain
iptables rule.
+ - ipvs
+ IPVS connection statistics (number of connections, octets and packets
+ for each service and destination).
+ See http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/software/index.html.
+
- irq
IRQ counters: Frequency in which certain interrupts occur.
- load
System load average over the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes.
+ - libvirt
+ CPU, disk and network I/O statistics from virtual machines.
+
- mbmon
Motherboard sensors: temperature, fanspeed and voltage information,
using mbmon(1).
+ - memcached
+ Statistics of the memcached distributed caching system.
+ <http://www.danga.com/memcached/>
+
- memory
Memory utilization: Memory occupied by running processes, page cache,
buffer cache and free.
MySQL server statistics: Commands issued, handlers triggered, thread
usage, query cache utilization and traffic/octets sent and received.
+ - netlink
+ Very detailed Linux network interface and routing statistics. You can get
+ (detailed) information on interfaces, qdiscs, classes, and, if you can
+ make use of it, filters.
+
- network
Receive values that were collected by other hosts. Large setups will
want to collect the data on one dedicated machine, and this is the
NFS Procedures: Which NFS command were called how often. Only NFSv2 and
NFSv3 right now.
+ - nginx
+ Collects statistics from `nginx' (speak: engine X), a HTTP and mail
+ server/proxy.
+
- ntp
NTP daemon statistics: Local clock drift, offset to peers, etc.
- perl
The perl plugin implements a Perl-interpreter into collectd. You can
- write your own plugins in Perl and return arbitary values using this
+ write your own plugins in Perl and return arbitrary values using this
API. See collectd-perl(5).
- This plugin is still considered to be experimental and subject to change
- between minor releases.
-
- ping
Network latency: Time to reach the default gateway or another given
host.
- serial
RX and TX of serial interfaces. Linux only; needs root privileges.
+ - snmp
+ Read values from SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) enabled
+ network devices such as switches, routers, thermometers, rack monitoring
+ servers, etc. See collectd-snmp(5).
+
- swap
Pages swapped out onto harddisk or whatever is called `swap' by the OS..
- tape
Bytes and operations read and written on tape devices. Solaris only.
+ - tcpconns
+ Number of TCP connections to specific local and remote ports.
+
- users
Users currently logged in.
- vserver
- System ressources used by Linux VServers.
+ System resources used by Linux VServers.
See <http://linux-vserver.org/>.
- wireless
Link quality of wireless cards. Linux only.
+ - xmms
+ Bitrate and frequency of music played with XMMS.
+
* Output can be written or send to various destinations by the following
plugins:
- csv
- Write to comma seperated values (CSV) files. This needs lots of
+ Write to comma separated values (CSV) files. This needs lots of
diskspace but is extremely portable and can be analysed with almost
every program that can analyse anything. Even Microsoft's Excel..
- logfile
Writes logmessages to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
+ - perl
+ Log messages are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
+ See collectd-perl(5).
+
- syslog
- Logs to the standard UNIX logging mechanismn, syslog.
+ Logs to the standard UNIX logging mechanism, syslog.
+
+ * Notifications can be handled by the following plugins:
+
+ - exec
+ Execute a program or script to handle the notification.
+ See collectd-exec(5).
+
+ - logfile
+ Writes the notification message to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
+
+ - network
+ Send the notification to a remote host to handle it somehow.
+
+ - perl
+ Notifications are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
+ See collectd-perl(5).
+
+ * Miscellaneous plugins:
+
+ - uuid
+ Sets the hostname to an unique identifier. This is meant for setups
+ where each client may migrate to another physical host, possibly going
+ through one or more name changes in the process.
* Performance: Since collectd is running as a daemon it doesn't spend much
time starting up again and again. With the exception of the exec plugin no
and multicore processors and makes sure that the daemon isn't idle if only
one plugins waits for an IO-operation to complete.
- * Once set up, hardly any maintenence is neccessary. Setup is kept as easy
+ * Once set up, hardly any maintenance is necessary. Setup is kept as easy
as possible and the default values should be okay for most users.
* When the `csv' or `rrdtool' plugins are loaded they'll write the values to
files. The usual place for these files is beneath `/var/lib/collectd'.
- * When using some of the plugins, collectd needs to run as user root, since only
- root can do certain things, such as craft ICMP packages needed to ping
+ * When using some of the plugins, collectd needs to run as user root, since
+ only root can do certain things, such as craft ICMP packages needed to ping
other hosts. collectd should NOT be installed setuid root since it can be
used to overwrite valuable files!
the values and read the rrdtool(1) manpage thoroughly.
+collectd and chkrootkit
+-----------------------
+
+ If you are using the `dns' plugin chkrootkit(1) will report collectd as a
+ packet sniffer ("<iface>: PACKET SNIFFER(/usr/sbin/collectd[<pid>])"). The
+ plugin captures all UDP packets on port 53 to analyze the DNS traffic. In
+ this case, collectd is a legitimate sniffer and the report should be
+ considered to be a false positive. However, you might want to check that
+ this really is collectd and not some other, illegitimate sniffer.
+
+
Prerequisites
-------------
* A POSIX-threads (pthread) implementation.
Since gathering some statistics is slow (network connections, slow devices,
- etc) the collectd is parellelized. The POSIX threads interface is being
+ etc) the collectd is parallelized. The POSIX threads interface is being
used and should be found in various implementations for hopefully all
platforms.
* libcurl (optional)
- If you want to use the `apache' plugin
+ If you want to use the `apache' and/or `nginx' plugins.
+
+ * libhal (optional)
+ If present, the uuid plugin will check for UUID from HAL.
* libiptc (optional)
For querying iptables counters.
* libmysqlclient (optional)
+ Unsurprisingly used by the `mysql' plugin.
+
+ * libnetlink (optional)
+ Used, obviously, for the `netlink' plugin.
+
+ * libnetsnmp (optional)
+ For the `snmp' plugin.
* liboping (optional, if not found a version shipped with this distribution
can be used)
* libpcap (optional)
Used to capture packets by the `dns' plugin.
+ * libperl (optional)
+ Obviously used by the `perl' plugin. The library has to be compiled with
+ ithread support (introduced in Perl 5.6.0).
+
* librrd (optional; headers and library; rrdtool 1.0 and 1.2 both work fine)
If built without `librrd' the resulting binary will be `client only', i.e.
- will send it's values via multicast and not create any RRD files itself.
- Alternatively you can chose to write CSV-files (Comma Seperated Values)
+ will send its values via multicast and not create any RRD files itself.
+ Alternatively you can chose to write CSV-files (Comma Separated Values)
instead.
* libsensors (optional)
- To read from `lm_sensors'.
+ To read from `lm_sensors', see the `sensors' plugin.
* libstatgrab may be used to collect statistics on systems other than Linux
and/or Solaris. Note that CPU- and disk-statistics, while being provided
* libupsclient/nut (optional)
For the `nut' plugin which queries nut's `upsd'.
+ * libxmms (optional)
+
* librt, libsocket, libkstat, libdevinfo
Various standard Solaris libraries which provide system functions.
For compiling on Darwin in general and the `apple_sensors' plugin in
particular.
+ * libvirt (optional)
+ Collect statistics from virtual machines.
+
+
+Configuring / Compiling / Installing
+------------------------------------
+
+ To configure, build and install collectd with the default settings, run
+ `./configure && make && make install'. For detailed, generic instructions
+ see INSTALL. For a complete list of configure options and their description,
+ run `./configure --help'.
+
+ By default, the configure script will check for all build dependencies and
+ disable all plugins whose requirements cannot be fulfilled (any other plugin
+ will be enabled). To enable a plugin, install missing dependencies (see
+ section `Prerequisites' above) and rerun `configure'. If you specify the
+ `--enable-<plugin>' configure option, you can force the plugin to be built.
+ This will most likely fail though unless you're working in a very unusual
+ setup and you really know what you're doing.
+
+ By default, collectd will be installed into `/opt/collectd'. You can adjust
+ this setting by specifying the `--prefix' configure option - see INSTALL for
+ details. If you pass DESTDIR=<path> to `make install', <path> will be
+ prefixed to all installation directories. This might be useful when creating
+ packages for collectd.
+
+
+Crosscompiling
+--------------
+
+ To compile correctly collectd needs to be able to initialize static
+ variables to NAN (Not A Number). Some C libraries, especially the GNU
+ libc, have a problem with that.
+
+ Luckily, with GCC it's possible to work around that problem: One can define
+ NAN as being (0.0 / 0.0) and `isnan' as `f != f'. However, to test this
+ ``implementation'' the configure script needs to compile and run a short
+ test program. Obviously running a test program when doing a cross-
+ compilation is, well, challenging.
+
+ If you run into this problem, you can use the `--with-nan-emulation'
+ configure option to force the use of this implementation. We can't promise
+ that the compiled binary actually behaves as it should, but since NANs
+ are likely never passed to the libm you have a good chance to be lucky.
+
+
+Contact
+-------
+
+ For questions, bugreports, development information and basically all other
+ concerns please send an email to collectd's mailinglist at
+ <collectd at verplant.org>.
+
+ For live discussion and more personal contact visit us in IRC, we're in
+ channel #collectd on freenode.
+
+
Author
------
Sebastian tokkee Harl <sh at tokkee.org>,
and many contributors (see `AUTHORS').
+ Please send bugreports and patches to the mailinglist, see `Contact' above.
+
projects / collectd.git / blobdiff