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 - ascent
30 Statistics about Ascent, a free server for the game `World of Warcraft'.
32 - battery
33 Batterycharge, -current and voltage of ACPI and PMU based laptop
34 batteries.
36 - cpu
37 CPU utilization: Time spent in the system, user, nice, idle, and related
38 states.
40 - cpufreq
41 CPU frequency (For laptops with speed step or a similar technology)
43 - df
44 Mountpoint usage (Basically the values `df(1)' delivers)
46 - disk
47 Disk utilization: Sectors read/written, number of read/write actions,
48 average time an IO-operation took to complete.
50 - dns
51 DNS traffic: Query types, response codes, opcodes and traffic/octets
52 transfered.
54 - email
55 Email statistics: Count, traffic, spam scores and checks.
56 See collectd-email(5).
58 - entropy
59 Amount of entropy available to the system.
61 - exec
62 Values gathered by a custom program or script.
63 See collectd-exec(5).
65 - filecount
66 Count the number of files in directories.
68 - hddtemp
69 Harddisk temperatures using hddtempd.
71 - interface
72 Interface traffic: Number of octets, packets and errors for each
73 interface.
75 - iptables
76 Iptables' counters: Number of bytes that were matched by a certain
77 iptables rule.
79 - ipvs
80 IPVS connection statistics (number of connections, octets and packets
81 for each service and destination).
82 See http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/software/index.html.
84 - irq
85 IRQ counters: Frequency in which certain interrupts occur.
87 - load
88 System load average over the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes.
90 - libvirt
91 CPU, disk and network I/O statistics from virtual machines.
93 - mbmon
94 Motherboard sensors: temperature, fanspeed and voltage information,
95 using mbmon(1).
97 - memcached
98 Statistics of the memcached distributed caching system.
99 <http://www.danga.com/memcached/>
101 - memory
102 Memory utilization: Memory occupied by running processes, page cache,
103 buffer cache and free.
105 - multimeter
106 Information provided by serial multimeters, such as the `Metex
107 M-4650CR'.
109 - mysql
110 MySQL server statistics: Commands issued, handlers triggered, thread
111 usage, query cache utilization and traffic/octets sent and received.
113 - netlink
114 Very detailed Linux network interface and routing statistics. You can get
115 (detailed) information on interfaces, qdiscs, classes, and, if you can
116 make use of it, filters.
118 - network
119 Receive values that were collected by other hosts. Large setups will
120 want to collect the data on one dedicated machine, and this is the
121 plugin of choice for that.
123 - nfs
124 NFS Procedures: Which NFS command were called how often. Only NFSv2 and
125 NFSv3 right now.
127 - nginx
128 Collects statistics from `nginx' (speak: engine X), a HTTP and mail
129 server/proxy.
131 - ntpd
132 NTP daemon statistics: Local clock drift, offset to peers, etc.
134 - nut
135 Network UPS tools: UPS current, voltage, power, charge, utilisation,
136 temperature, etc. See upsd(8).
138 - onewire (EXPERIMENTAL!)
139 Read onewire sensors using the owcapu library of the owfs project.
140 Please read in collectd.conf(5) why this plugin is experimental.
142 - perl
143 The perl plugin implements a Perl-interpreter into collectd. You can
144 write your own plugins in Perl and return arbitrary values using this
145 API. See collectd-perl(5).
147 - ping
148 Network latency: Time to reach the default gateway or another given
149 host.
151 - postgresql
152 PostgreSQL database statistics: active server connections, transaction
153 numbers, block IO, table row manipulations.
155 - processes
156 Process counts: Number of running, sleeping, zombie, ... processes.
158 - sensors
159 System sensors, accessed using lm_sensors: Voltages, temperatures and
160 fan rotation speeds.
162 - serial
163 RX and TX of serial interfaces. Linux only; needs root privileges.
165 - snmp
166 Read values from SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) enabled
167 network devices such as switches, routers, thermometers, rack monitoring
168 servers, etc. See collectd-snmp(5).
170 - swap
171 Pages swapped out onto harddisk or whatever is called `swap' by the OS..
173 - tail
174 Follows (tails) logfiles, parses them by lines and submits matched
175 values.
177 - tape
178 Bytes and operations read and written on tape devices. Solaris only.
180 - tcpconns
181 Number of TCP connections to specific local and remote ports.
183 - users
184 Users currently logged in.
186 - vmem
187 Virtual memory statistics, e. g. the number of page-ins/-outs or the
188 number of pagefaults.
190 - vserver
191 System resources used by Linux VServers.
192 See <http://linux-vserver.org/>.
194 - wireless
195 Link quality of wireless cards. Linux only.
197 - xmms
198 Bitrate and frequency of music played with XMMS.
200 * Output can be written or send to various destinations by the following
201 plugins:
203 - csv
204 Write to comma separated values (CSV) files. This needs lots of
205 diskspace but is extremely portable and can be analysed with almost
206 every program that can analyse anything. Even Microsoft's Excel..
208 - network
209 Send the data to a remote host to save the data somehow. This is useful
210 for large setups where the data should be saved by a dedicated machine.
212 - perl
213 Of course the values are propagated to plugins written in Perl, too, so
214 you can easily do weird stuff with the plugins we didn't dare think of
215 ;) See collectd-perl(5).
217 - rrdtool
218 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using librrd. See rrdtool(1).
219 This is likely the most popular destination for such values. Since
220 updates to RRD-files are somewhat expensive this plugin can cache
221 updates to the files and write a bunch of updates at once, which lessens
222 system load a lot.
224 - unixsock
225 One can query the values from the unixsock plugin whenever they're
226 needed. Please read collectd-unixsock(5) for a description on how that's
227 done.
229 * Logging is, as everything in collectd, provided by plugins. The following
230 plugins keep up informed about what's going on:
232 - logfile
233 Writes logmessages to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
235 - perl
236 Log messages are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
237 See collectd-perl(5).
239 - syslog
240 Logs to the standard UNIX logging mechanism, syslog.
242 * Notifications can be handled by the following plugins:
244 - notify_desktop
245 Send a desktop notification to a notification daemon, as defined in
246 the Desktop Notification Specification. To actually display the
247 notifications, notification-daemon is required.
248 See http://www.galago-project.org/specs/notification/.
250 - notify_email
251 Send an E-mail with the notification message to the configured
252 recipients.
254 - exec
255 Execute a program or script to handle the notification.
256 See collectd-exec(5).
258 - logfile
259 Writes the notification message to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
261 - network
262 Send the notification to a remote host to handle it somehow.
264 - perl
265 Notifications are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
266 See collectd-perl(5).
268 * Miscellaneous plugins:
270 - uuid
271 Sets the hostname to an unique identifier. This is meant for setups
272 where each client may migrate to another physical host, possibly going
273 through one or more name changes in the process.
275 * Performance: Since collectd is running as a daemon it doesn't spend much
276 time starting up again and again. With the exception of the exec plugin no
277 processes are forked. Caching in output plugins, such as the rrdtool and
278 network plugins, makes sure your resources are used efficiently. Also,
279 since collectd is programmed multithreaded it benefits from hyperthreading
280 and multicore processors and makes sure that the daemon isn't idle if only
281 one plugins waits for an IO-operation to complete.
283 * Once set up, hardly any maintenance is necessary. Setup is kept as easy
284 as possible and the default values should be okay for most users.
287 Operation
288 ---------
290 * collectd's configuration file can be found at `sysconfdir'/collectd.conf.
291 Run `collectd -h' for a list of builtin defaults. See `collectd.conf(5)'
292 for a list of options and a syntax description.
294 * When the `csv' or `rrdtool' plugins are loaded they'll write the values to
295 files. The usual place for these files is beneath `/var/lib/collectd'.
297 * When using some of the plugins, collectd needs to run as user root, since
298 only root can do certain things, such as craft ICMP packages needed to ping
299 other hosts. collectd should NOT be installed setuid root since it can be
300 used to overwrite valuable files!
302 * Sample scripts to generate graphs reside in `contrib/' in the source
303 package or somewhere near `/usr/share/doc/collectd' in most distributions.
304 Please be aware that those script are meant as a starting point for your
305 own experiments.. Some of them require the `RRDs' Perl module.
306 (`librrds-perl' on Debian) If you have written a more sophisticated
307 solution please share it with us.
309 * The RRAs of the automatically created RRD files depend on the `step'
310 and `heartbeat' settings given. If change these settings you may need to
311 re-create the files, losing all data. Please be aware of that when changing
312 the values and read the rrdtool(1) manpage thoroughly.
315 collectd and chkrootkit
316 -----------------------
318 If you are using the `dns' plugin chkrootkit(1) will report collectd as a
319 packet sniffer ("<iface>: PACKET SNIFFER(/usr/sbin/collectd[<pid>])"). The
320 plugin captures all UDP packets on port 53 to analyze the DNS traffic. In
321 this case, collectd is a legitimate sniffer and the report should be
322 considered to be a false positive. However, you might want to check that
323 this really is collectd and not some other, illegitimate sniffer.
326 Prerequisites
327 -------------
329 To compile collectd from source you will need:
331 * Usual suspects: C compiler, linker, preprocessor, make, ...
333 * A POSIX-threads (pthread) implementation.
334 Since gathering some statistics is slow (network connections, slow devices,
335 etc) the collectd is parallelized. The POSIX threads interface is being
336 used and should be found in various implementations for hopefully all
337 platforms.
339 * CoreFoundation.framework and IOKit.framework (optional)
340 For compiling on Darwin in general and the `apple_sensors' plugin in
341 particular.
343 * libcurl (optional)
344 If you want to use the `apache', `ascent', or `nginx' plugin.
346 * libesmtp (optional)
347 For the `notify_email' plugin.
349 * libhal (optional)
350 If present, the uuid plugin will check for UUID from HAL.
352 * libiptc (optional)
353 For querying iptables counters.
355 * libmysqlclient (optional)
356 Unsurprisingly used by the `mysql' plugin.
358 * libnetlink (optional)
359 Used, obviously, for the `netlink' plugin.
361 * libnetsnmp (optional)
362 For the `snmp' plugin.
364 * libnotify (optional)
365 For the `notify_desktop' plugin.
367 * liboping (optional, if not found a version shipped with this distribution
368 can be used)
369 Used by the `ping' plugin to send and receive ICMP packets.
371 * libowcapi (optional)
372 Used by the `onewire' plugin to read values from onewire sensors (or the
373 owserver(1) daemon).
375 * libpcap (optional)
376 Used to capture packets by the `dns' plugin.
378 * libperl (optional)
379 Obviously used by the `perl' plugin. The library has to be compiled with
380 ithread support (introduced in Perl 5.6.0).
382 * libpq (optional)
383 The PostgreSQL C client library used by the `postgresql' plugin.
385 * librrd (optional; headers and library; rrdtool 1.0 and 1.2 both work fine)
386 If built without `librrd' the resulting binary will be `client only', i.e.
387 will send its values via multicast and not create any RRD files itself.
388 Alternatively you can chose to write CSV-files (Comma Separated Values)
389 instead.
391 * librt, libsocket, libkstat, libdevinfo (optional)
392 Various standard Solaris libraries which provide system functions.
394 * libsensors (optional)
395 To read from `lm_sensors', see the `sensors' plugin.
397 * libstatgrab (optional) may be used to collect statistics on systems other
398 than Linux and/or Solaris. Note that CPU- and disk-statistics, while being
399 provided by this library, are not supported in collectd right now..
400 <http://www.i-scream.org/libstatgrab/>
402 * libupsclient/nut (optional)
403 For the `nut' plugin which queries nut's `upsd'.
405 * libvirt (optional)
406 Collect statistics from virtual machines.
408 * libxml2 (optional)
409 Parse XML data. This is needed for the `ascent' and `libvirt' plugins.
411 * libxmms (optional)
414 Configuring / Compiling / Installing
415 ------------------------------------
417 To configure, build and install collectd with the default settings, run
418 `./configure && make && make install'. For detailed, generic instructions
419 see INSTALL. For a complete list of configure options and their description,
420 run `./configure --help'.
422 By default, the configure script will check for all build dependencies and
423 disable all plugins whose requirements cannot be fulfilled (any other plugin
424 will be enabled). To enable a plugin, install missing dependencies (see
425 section `Prerequisites' above) and rerun `configure'. If you specify the
426 `--enable-<plugin>' configure option, the script will fail if the depen-
427 dencies for the specified plugin are not met. If you specify the
428 `--disable-<plugin>' configure option, the plugin will not be built. Both
429 options are meant for package maintainers and should not be used in everyday
430 situations.
432 By default, collectd will be installed into `/opt/collectd'. You can adjust
433 this setting by specifying the `--prefix' configure option - see INSTALL for
434 details. If you pass DESTDIR=<path> to `make install', <path> will be
435 prefixed to all installation directories. This might be useful when creating
436 packages for collectd.
439 Crosscompiling
440 --------------
442 To compile correctly collectd needs to be able to initialize static
443 variables to NAN (Not A Number). Some C libraries, especially the GNU
444 libc, have a problem with that.
446 Luckily, with GCC it's possible to work around that problem: One can define
447 NAN as being (0.0 / 0.0) and `isnan' as `f != f'. However, to test this
448 ``implementation'' the configure script needs to compile and run a short
449 test program. Obviously running a test program when doing a cross-
450 compilation is, well, challenging.
452 If you run into this problem, you can use the `--with-nan-emulation'
453 configure option to force the use of this implementation. We can't promise
454 that the compiled binary actually behaves as it should, but since NANs
455 are likely never passed to the libm you have a good chance to be lucky.
457 Likewise, collectd needs to know the layout of doubles in memory, in order
458 to craft uniform network packets over different architectures. For this, it
459 needs to know how to convert doubles into the memory layout used by x86. The
460 configure script tries to figure this out by compiling and running a few
461 small test programs. This is of course not possible when cross-compiling.
462 You can use the `--with-fp-layout' option to tell the configure script which
463 conversion method to assume. Valid arguments are:
465 * `nothing' (12345678 -> 12345678)
466 * `endianflip' (12345678 -> 87654321)
467 * `intswap' (12345678 -> 56781234)
470 Contact
471 -------
473 For questions, bug reports, development information and basically all other
474 concerns please send an email to collectd's mailing list at
475 <collectd at verplant.org>.
477 For live discussion and more personal contact visit us in IRC, we're in
478 channel #collectd on freenode.
481 Author
482 ------
484 Florian octo Forster <octo at verplant.org>,
485 Sebastian tokkee Harl <sh at tokkee.org>,
486 and many contributors (see `AUTHORS').
488 Please send bug reports and patches to the mailing list, see `Contact'
489 above.