06650e81214aa634e187ec7198ddafd5af10073f
1 collectd - System information collection daemon
2 =================================================
3 http://collectd.org/
5 About
6 -----
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
10 ways.
13 Features
14 --------
16 * collectd is able to collect the following data:
18 - apache
19 Apache server utilization: Number of bytes transfered, number of
20 requests handled and detailed scoreboard statistics
22 - apcups
23 APC UPS Daemon: UPS charge, load, input/output/battery voltage, etc.
25 - apple_sensors
26 Sensors in Macs running Mac OS X / Darwin: Temperature, fanspeed and
27 voltage sensors.
29 - battery
30 Batterycharge, -current and voltage of ACPI and PMU based laptop
31 batteries.
33 - cpu
34 CPU utilization: Time spent in the system, user, nice, idle, and related
35 states.
37 - cpufreq
38 CPU frequency (For laptops with speed step or a similar technology)
40 - df
41 Mountpoint usage (Basically the values `df(1)' delivers)
43 - disk
44 Disk utilization: Sectors read/written, number of read/write actions,
45 average time an IO-operation took to complete.
47 - dns
48 DNS traffic: Query types, response codes, opcodes and traffic/octets
49 transfered.
51 - email
52 Email statistics: Count, traffic, spam scores and checks.
53 See collectd-email(5).
55 - entropy
56 Amount of entropy available to the system.
58 - exec
59 Values gathered by a custom program or script.
60 See collectd-exec(5).
62 - hddtemp
63 Harddisk temperatures using hddtempd.
65 - interface
66 Interface traffic: Number of octets, packets and errors for each
67 interface.
69 - iptables
70 Iptables' counters: Number of bytes that were matched by a certain
71 iptables rule.
73 - ipvs
74 IPVS connection statistics (number of connections, octets and packets
75 for each service and destination).
76 See http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/software/index.html.
78 - irq
79 IRQ counters: Frequency in which certain interrupts occur.
81 - load
82 System load average over the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes.
84 - libvirt
85 CPU, disk and network I/O statistics from virtual machines.
87 - mbmon
88 Motherboard sensors: temperature, fanspeed and voltage information,
89 using mbmon(1).
91 - memcached
92 Statistics of the memcached distributed caching system.
93 <http://www.danga.com/memcached/>
95 - memory
96 Memory utilization: Memory occupied by running processes, page cache,
97 buffer cache and free.
99 - multimeter
100 Information provided by serial multimeters, such as the `Metex
101 M-4650CR'.
103 - mysql
104 MySQL server statistics: Commands issued, handlers triggered, thread
105 usage, query cache utilization and traffic/octets sent and received.
107 - netlink
108 Very detailed Linux network interface and routing statistics. You can get
109 (detailed) information on interfaces, qdiscs, classes, and, if you can
110 make use of it, filters.
112 - network
113 Receive values that were collected by other hosts. Large setups will
114 want to collect the data on one dedicated machine, and this is the
115 plugin of choice for that.
117 - nfs
118 NFS Procedures: Which NFS command were called how often. Only NFSv2 and
119 NFSv3 right now.
121 - nginx
122 Collects statistics from `nginx' (speak: engine X), a HTTP and mail
123 server/proxy.
125 - ntp
126 NTP daemon statistics: Local clock drift, offset to peers, etc.
128 - nut
129 Network UPS tools: UPS current, voltage, power, charge, utilisation,
130 temperature, etc. See upsd(8).
132 - perl
133 The perl plugin implements a Perl-interpreter into collectd. You can
134 write your own plugins in Perl and return arbitrary values using this
135 API. See collectd-perl(5).
137 - ping
138 Network latency: Time to reach the default gateway or another given
139 host.
141 - processes
142 Process counts: Number of running, sleeping, zombie, ... processes.
144 - sensors
145 System sensors, accessed using lm_sensors: Voltages, temperatures and
146 fan rotation speeds.
148 - serial
149 RX and TX of serial interfaces. Linux only; needs root privileges.
151 - snmp
152 Read values from SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) enabled
153 network devices such as switches, routers, thermometers, rack monitoring
154 servers, etc. See collectd-snmp(5).
156 - swap
157 Pages swapped out onto harddisk or whatever is called `swap' by the OS..
159 - tape
160 Bytes and operations read and written on tape devices. Solaris only.
162 - tcpconns
163 Number of TCP connections to specific local and remote ports.
165 - users
166 Users currently logged in.
168 - vserver
169 System resources used by Linux VServers.
170 See <http://linux-vserver.org/>.
172 - wireless
173 Link quality of wireless cards. Linux only.
175 - xmms
176 Bitrate and frequency of music played with XMMS.
178 * Output can be written or send to various destinations by the following
179 plugins:
181 - csv
182 Write to comma separated values (CSV) files. This needs lots of
183 diskspace but is extremely portable and can be analysed with almost
184 every program that can analyse anything. Even Microsoft's Excel..
186 - network
187 Send the data to a remote host to save the data somehow. This is useful
188 for large setups where the data should be saved by a dedicated machine.
190 - perl
191 Of course the values are propagated to plugins written in Perl, too, so
192 you can easily do weird stuff with the plugins we didn't dare think of
193 ;) See collectd-perl(5).
195 - rrdtool
196 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using librrd. See rrdtool(1).
197 This is likely the most popular destination for such values. Since
198 updates to RRD-files are somewhat expensive this plugin can cache
199 updates to the files and write a bunch of updates at once, which lessens
200 system load a lot.
202 - unixsock
203 One can query the values from the unixsock plugin whenever they're
204 needed. Please read collectd-unixsock(5) for a description on how that's
205 done.
207 * Logging is, as everything in collectd, provided by plugins. The following
208 plugins keep up informed about what's going on:
210 - logfile
211 Writes logmessages to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
213 - syslog
214 Logs to the standard UNIX logging mechanism, syslog.
216 * Miscellaneous plugins:
218 - uuid
219 Sets the hostname to an unique identifier. This is meant for setups
220 where each client may migrate to another physical host, possibly going
221 through one or more name changes in the process.
223 * Performance: Since collectd is running as a daemon it doesn't spend much
224 time starting up again and again. With the exception of the exec plugin no
225 processes are forked. Caching in output plugins, such as the rrdtool and
226 network plugins, makes sure your resources are used efficiently. Also,
227 since collectd is programmed multithreaded it benefits from hyperthreading
228 and multicore processors and makes sure that the daemon isn't idle if only
229 one plugins waits for an IO-operation to complete.
231 * Once set up, hardly any maintenance is necessary. Setup is kept as easy
232 as possible and the default values should be okay for most users.
235 Operation
236 ---------
238 * collectd's configuration file can be found at `sysconfdir'/collectd.conf.
239 Run `collectd -h' for a list of builtin defaults. See `collectd.conf(5)'
240 for a list of options and a syntax description.
242 * When the `csv' or `rrdtool' plugins are loaded they'll write the values to
243 files. The usual place for these files is beneath `/var/lib/collectd'.
245 * When using some of the plugins, collectd needs to run as user root, since
246 only root can do certain things, such as craft ICMP packages needed to ping
247 other hosts. collectd should NOT be installed setuid root since it can be
248 used to overwrite valuable files!
250 * Sample scripts to generate graphs reside in `contrib/' in the source
251 package or somewhere near `/usr/share/doc/collectd' in most distributions.
252 Please be aware that those script are meant as a starting point for your
253 own experiments.. Some of them require the `RRDs' Perl module.
254 (`librrds-perl' on Debian) If you have written a more sophisticated
255 solution please share it with us.
257 * The RRAs of the automatically created RRD files depend on the `step'
258 and `heartbeat' settings given. If change these settings you may need to
259 re-create the files, losing all data. Please be aware of that when changing
260 the values and read the rrdtool(1) manpage thoroughly.
263 collectd and chkrootkit
264 -----------------------
266 If you are using the `dns' plugin chkrootkit(1) will report collectd as a
267 packet sniffer ("<iface>: PACKET SNIFFER(/usr/sbin/collectd[<pid>])"). The
268 plugin captures all UDP packets on port 53 to analyze the DNS traffic. In
269 this case, collectd is a legitimate sniffer and the report should be
270 considered to be a false positive. However, you might want to check that
271 this really is collectd and not some other, illegitimate sniffer.
274 Prerequisites
275 -------------
277 To compile collectd from source you will need:
279 * Usual suspects: C compiler, linker, preprocessor, make, ...
281 * A POSIX-threads (pthread) implementation.
282 Since gathering some statistics is slow (network connections, slow devices,
283 etc) the collectd is parallelized. The POSIX threads interface is being
284 used and should be found in various implementations for hopefully all
285 platforms.
287 * libcurl (optional)
288 If you want to use the `apache' and/or `nginx' plugins.
290 * libhal (optional)
291 If present, the uuid plugin will check for UUID from HAL.
293 * libiptc (optional)
294 For querying iptables counters.
296 * libmysqlclient (optional)
297 Unsurprisingly used by the `mysql' plugin.
299 * libnetlink (optional)
300 Used, obviously, for the `netlink' plugin.
302 * libnetsnmp (optional)
303 For the `snmp' plugin.
305 * liboping (optional, if not found a version shipped with this distribution
306 can be used)
307 Used by the `ping' plugin to send and receive ICMP packets.
309 * libpcap (optional)
310 Used to capture packets by the `dns' plugin.
312 * libperl (optional)
313 Obviously used by the `perl' plugin. The library has to be compiled with
314 ithread support (introduced in Perl 5.6.0).
316 * librrd (optional; headers and library; rrdtool 1.0 and 1.2 both work fine)
317 If built without `librrd' the resulting binary will be `client only', i.e.
318 will send its values via multicast and not create any RRD files itself.
319 Alternatively you can chose to write CSV-files (Comma Separated Values)
320 instead.
322 * libsensors (optional)
323 To read from `lm_sensors', see the `sensors' plugin.
325 * libstatgrab may be used to collect statistics on systems other than Linux
326 and/or Solaris. Note that CPU- and disk-statistics, while being provided
327 by this library, are not supported in collectd right now..
328 <http://www.i-scream.org/libstatgrab/>
330 * libupsclient/nut (optional)
331 For the `nut' plugin which queries nut's `upsd'.
333 * libxmms (optional)
335 * librt, libsocket, libkstat, libdevinfo
336 Various standard Solaris libraries which provide system functions.
338 * CoreFoundation.framework and IOKit.framework
339 For compiling on Darwin in general and the `apple_sensors' plugin in
340 particular.
342 * libvirt (optional)
343 Collect statistics from virtual machines.
346 Configuring / Compiling / Installing
347 ------------------------------------
349 To configure, build and install collectd with the default settings, run
350 `./configure && make && make install'. For detailed, generic instructions
351 see INSTALL. For a complete list of configure options and their description,
352 run `./configure --help'.
354 By default, the configure script will check for all build dependencies and
355 disable all plugins whose requirements cannot be fulfilled (any other plugin
356 will be enabled). To enable a plugin, install missing dependencies (see
357 section `Prerequisites' above) and rerun `configure'. If you specify the
358 `--enable-<plugin>' configure option, you can force the plugin to be built.
359 This will most likely fail though unless you're working in a very unusual
360 setup and you really know what you're doing.
362 By default, collectd will be installed into `/opt/collectd'. You can adjust
363 this setting by specifying the `--prefix' configure option - see INSTALL for
364 details. If you pass DESTDIR=<path> to `make install', <path> will be
365 prefixed to all installation directories. This might be useful when creating
366 packages for collectd.
369 Crosscompiling
370 --------------
372 To compile correctly collectd needs to be able to initialize static
373 variables to NAN (Not A Number). Some C libraries, especially the GNU
374 libc, have a problem with that.
376 Luckily, with GCC it's possible to work around that problem: One can define
377 NAN as being (0.0 / 0.0) and `isnan' as `f != f'. However, to test this
378 ``implementation'' the configure script needs to compile and run a short
379 test program. Obviously running a test program when doing a cross-
380 compilation is, well, challenging.
382 If you run into this problem, you can use the `--with-nan-emulation'
383 configure option to force the use of this implementation. We can't promise
384 that the compiled binary actually behaves as it should, but since NANs
385 are likely never passed to the libm you have a good chance to be lucky.
388 Contact
389 -------
391 For questions, bugreports, development information and basically all other
392 concerns please send an email to collectd's mailinglist at
393 <collectd at verplant.org>.
395 For live discussion and more personal contact visit us in IRC, we're in
396 channel #collectd on freenode.
399 Author
400 ------
402 Florian octo Forster <octo at verplant.org>,
403 Sebastian tokkee Harl <sh at tokkee.org>,
404 and many contributors (see `AUTHORS').
406 Please send bugreports and patches to the mailinglist, see `Contact' above.