1 collectd - System information collection daemon
2 =================================================
3 http://collectd.org/
5 About
6 -----
8 collectd is a small daemon which collects statistics about a computer's
9 usage and writes then into RRD files.
12 Features
13 --------
15 * collectd is able to collect the following data:
17 - Apache server utilization
18 (Number of bytes transfered, number of requests handled and detailed
19 scoreboard statistics)
21 - APC UPS Daemon
22 (UPS charge, load, input/output/battery voltage, etc)
24 - Apple Sensors
25 (Temperature, fanspeed and voltage sensors of apple computers)
27 - Battery
28 (Charge, current and charge of ACPI and PMU based batteries)
30 - CPU utilization
31 (Time spent in system, user, nice and idle)
33 - CPU frequency
34 (For laptops with speed step or a similar technology)
36 - Mountpoint usage
37 (Basically the values `df(1)' delivers)
39 - Disk utilization
40 (Sectors read/written, number of read/write actions, time spent doing IO)
42 - DNS traffic
43 (query types, response codes, opcodes and traffic)
45 - Email statistics
46 (count, traffic, spam scores and checks)
48 - Harddisk temperatures
49 (Uhm, yeah, temperature of harddisks that is ;)
51 - System load
52 (Load average over the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes)
54 - Memory utilization
55 (Memory occupied by running processes, page cache, buffer cache and free)
57 - MySQL server statistics
58 (Commands issued, handlers triggered, thread usage, query cache
59 utilization and traffic sent/received)
61 - NFS Procedures
62 (Which NFS command were called how often. Only NFSv2 and NFSv3 right now)
64 - NTP Daemon
65 (Local clock drift, offset to peers, etc)
67 - Ping latency
68 (Time to reach the default gateway or another given host)
70 - Process counts
71 (Number of running, sleeping, zombie, ... processes)
73 - Sensors
74 (lm_sensors voltages, temperatures and fan rotation speeds)
76 - Serial
77 (RX and TX of serial interfaces)
79 - Swap
80 (Pages swapped out onto harddisk or whatever is called `swap' by the OS..)
82 - Tape
83 (Read and write bytes and operations on tape devices)
85 - Traffic
86 (In/Outbound traffic on the interfaces)
88 - Users
89 (Currently logged in users)
91 - VServer
92 (System ressources used by vservers)
94 - Wireless
95 (Link quality of wireless cards)
97 * Performance: Running as a daemon collectd doesn't spend much time in
98 startup. Since collectd links against libping, librrd and libsensors it
99 doesn't need to start any other processes.
101 * Hardly any maintenance neccessary and setup is trivial.
103 * Extremely easy and failsafe network operation possible.
106 Operation
107 ---------
109 * collectd's configuration file can be found at `sysconfdir'/collectd.conf.
110 Run `collectd -h' for a list of builtin defaults. See `collectd.conf(5)'
111 for a list of options and a syntax description.
113 * When running collectd writes system statistics in RRD-files. Per default
114 they reside in `/var/lib/collectd'.
116 * When using the `ping' plugin collectd needs to run as user root, since only
117 root can craft ICMP packages needed to ping other hosts. collectd should
118 NOT be installed setuid root since it can be used to overwrite valuable
119 files..
121 * Sample scripts to generate graphs reside in `contrib/' in the source
122 package or somewhere near `/usr/share/doc/collectd' in most distributions.
123 Please be aware that those script are meant as a starting point for your
124 own experiments.. Some of them require the `RRDs' Perl module.
125 (`librrds-perl' on Debian)
127 * The RRAs of the automatically created RRD files depend on the `step'
128 and `heartbeat' settings given on compile time. For a list of the
129 default RRAs take a look in the collectd(1) manpage.
132 Prerequisites
133 -------------
135 To compile collectd from source you will need:
137 * Usual suspects: C compiler, linker, preprocessor, make, ...
139 * rrdtool (headers and library; rrdtool 1.0 and 1.2 both work fine)
140 If built without `librrd' the resulting binary will be `client only', i.e.
141 will send it's values via multicast and not create any RRD files itself.
143 * libmysqlclient (optional)
145 * lm-sensors (optional)
147 * libstatgrab may be used to collect statistics on systems other than Linux
148 and/or Solaris. Note that CPU- and disk-statistics, while being provided by
149 this library, are not supported in collectd right now..
150 <http://www.i-scream.org/libstatgrab/>
152 * libcurl (optional)
153 If you want to use the `apache' plugin
155 * CoreFoundation.framework and IOKit.framework
156 For copiling on darwin in general and the `apple_sensors' plugin in
157 particular.
159 Author
160 ------
162 Florian octo Forster <octo at verplant.org>