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 - curl
37 Parse statistics from websites using regular expressions.
39 - bind
40 Name server and resolver statistics from the `statistics-channel'
41 interface of BIND 9.5, 9,6 and later.
43 - cpu
44 CPU utilization: Time spent in the system, user, nice, idle, and related
45 states.
47 - cpufreq
48 CPU frequency (For laptops with speed step or a similar technology)
50 - dbi
51 Executes SQL statements on various databases and interprets the returned
52 data.
54 - df
55 Mountpoint usage (Basically the values `df(1)' delivers)
57 - disk
58 Disk utilization: Sectors read/written, number of read/write actions,
59 average time an IO-operation took to complete.
61 - dns
62 DNS traffic: Query types, response codes, opcodes and traffic/octets
63 transfered.
65 - email
66 Email statistics: Count, traffic, spam scores and checks.
67 See collectd-email(5).
69 - entropy
70 Amount of entropy available to the system.
72 - exec
73 Values gathered by a custom program or script.
74 See collectd-exec(5).
76 - filecount
77 Count the number of files in directories.
79 - hddtemp
80 Harddisk temperatures using hddtempd.
82 - interface
83 Interface traffic: Number of octets, packets and errors for each
84 interface.
86 - iptables
87 Iptables' counters: Number of bytes that were matched by a certain
88 iptables rule.
90 - ipmi
91 IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) sensors information.
93 - ipvs
94 IPVS connection statistics (number of connections, octets and packets
95 for each service and destination).
96 See http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/software/index.html.
98 - irq
99 IRQ counters: Frequency in which certain interrupts occur.
101 - load
102 System load average over the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes.
104 - libvirt
105 CPU, disk and network I/O statistics from virtual machines.
107 - mbmon
108 Motherboard sensors: temperature, fanspeed and voltage information,
109 using mbmon(1).
111 - memcached
112 Statistics of the memcached distributed caching system.
113 <http://www.danga.com/memcached/>
115 - memory
116 Memory utilization: Memory occupied by running processes, page cache,
117 buffer cache and free.
119 - multimeter
120 Information provided by serial multimeters, such as the `Metex
121 M-4650CR'.
123 - mysql
124 MySQL server statistics: Commands issued, handlers triggered, thread
125 usage, query cache utilization and traffic/octets sent and received.
127 - netlink
128 Very detailed Linux network interface and routing statistics. You can get
129 (detailed) information on interfaces, qdiscs, classes, and, if you can
130 make use of it, filters.
132 - network
133 Receive values that were collected by other hosts. Large setups will
134 want to collect the data on one dedicated machine, and this is the
135 plugin of choice for that.
137 - nfs
138 NFS Procedures: Which NFS command were called how often. Only NFSv2 and
139 NFSv3 right now.
141 - nginx
142 Collects statistics from `nginx' (speak: engine X), a HTTP and mail
143 server/proxy.
145 - ntpd
146 NTP daemon statistics: Local clock drift, offset to peers, etc.
148 - nut
149 Network UPS tools: UPS current, voltage, power, charge, utilisation,
150 temperature, etc. See upsd(8).
152 - onewire (EXPERIMENTAL!)
153 Read onewire sensors using the owcapu library of the owfs project.
154 Please read in collectd.conf(5) why this plugin is experimental.
156 - openvpn
157 RX and TX of each client in openvpn-status.log (status-version 2).
158 <http://openvpn.net/index.php/documentation/howto.html>
160 - oracle
161 Query data from an Oracle database.
163 - perl
164 The perl plugin implements a Perl-interpreter into collectd. You can
165 write your own plugins in Perl and return arbitrary values using this
166 API. See collectd-perl(5).
168 - ping
169 Network latency: Time to reach the default gateway or another given
170 host.
172 - postgresql
173 PostgreSQL database statistics: active server connections, transaction
174 numbers, block IO, table row manipulations.
176 - powerdns
177 PowerDNS name server statistics.
179 - processes
180 Process counts: Number of running, sleeping, zombie, ... processes.
182 - protocols
183 Counts various aspects of network protocols such as IP, TCP, UDP, etc.
185 - rrdcached
186 RRDtool caching daemon (RRDcacheD) statistics.
188 - sensors
189 System sensors, accessed using lm_sensors: Voltages, temperatures and
190 fan rotation speeds.
192 - serial
193 RX and TX of serial interfaces. Linux only; needs root privileges.
195 - snmp
196 Read values from SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) enabled
197 network devices such as switches, routers, thermometers, rack monitoring
198 servers, etc. See collectd-snmp(5).
200 - swap
201 Pages swapped out onto harddisk or whatever is called `swap' by the OS..
203 - tail
204 Follows (tails) logfiles, parses them by lines and submits matched
205 values.
207 - tape
208 Bytes and operations read and written on tape devices. Solaris only.
210 - tcpconns
211 Number of TCP connections to specific local and remote ports.
213 - teamspeak2
214 TeamSpeak2 server statistics.
216 - thermal
217 Linux ACPI thermal zone information.
219 - users
220 Users currently logged in.
222 - vmem
223 Virtual memory statistics, e. g. the number of page-ins/-outs or the
224 number of pagefaults.
226 - vserver
227 System resources used by Linux VServers.
228 See <http://linux-vserver.org/>.
230 - wireless
231 Link quality of wireless cards. Linux only.
233 - xmms
234 Bitrate and frequency of music played with XMMS.
236 * Output can be written or send to various destinations by the following
237 plugins:
239 - csv
240 Write to comma separated values (CSV) files. This needs lots of
241 diskspace but is extremely portable and can be analysed with almost
242 every program that can analyse anything. Even Microsoft's Excel..
244 - network
245 Send the data to a remote host to save the data somehow. This is useful
246 for large setups where the data should be saved by a dedicated machine.
248 - perl
249 Of course the values are propagated to plugins written in Perl, too, so
250 you can easily do weird stuff with the plugins we didn't dare think of
251 ;) See collectd-perl(5).
253 - rrdcached
254 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using the RRDtool caching
255 daemon (RRDcacheD) - see rrdcached(1). That daemon provides a general
256 implementation of the caching done by the `rrdtool' plugin.
258 - rrdtool
259 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using librrd. See rrdtool(1).
260 This is likely the most popular destination for such values. Since
261 updates to RRD-files are somewhat expensive this plugin can cache
262 updates to the files and write a bunch of updates at once, which lessens
263 system load a lot.
265 - unixsock
266 One can query the values from the unixsock plugin whenever they're
267 needed. Please read collectd-unixsock(5) for a description on how that's
268 done.
270 * Logging is, as everything in collectd, provided by plugins. The following
271 plugins keep up informed about what's going on:
273 - logfile
274 Writes logmessages to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
276 - perl
277 Log messages are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
278 See collectd-perl(5).
280 - syslog
281 Logs to the standard UNIX logging mechanism, syslog.
283 * Notifications can be handled by the following plugins:
285 - notify_desktop
286 Send a desktop notification to a notification daemon, as defined in
287 the Desktop Notification Specification. To actually display the
288 notifications, notification-daemon is required.
289 See http://www.galago-project.org/specs/notification/.
291 - notify_email
292 Send an E-mail with the notification message to the configured
293 recipients.
295 - exec
296 Execute a program or script to handle the notification.
297 See collectd-exec(5).
299 - logfile
300 Writes the notification message to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
302 - network
303 Send the notification to a remote host to handle it somehow.
305 - perl
306 Notifications are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
307 See collectd-perl(5).
309 * Value processing can be controlled using the "filter chain" infrastructure
310 and "matches" and "targets". The following plugins are available:
312 - match_regex
313 Match values by their identifier based on regular expressions.
315 - match_timediff
316 Match values with an invalid timestamp.
318 - match_value
319 Select values by their data sources' values.
321 - target_notification
322 Create and dispatch a notification.
324 - target_replace
325 Replace parts of an identifier using regular expressions.
327 - target_set
328 Set (overwrite) entire parts of an identifier.
330 * Miscellaneous plugins:
332 - uuid
333 Sets the hostname to an unique identifier. This is meant for setups
334 where each client may migrate to another physical host, possibly going
335 through one or more name changes in the process.
337 * Performance: Since collectd is running as a daemon it doesn't spend much
338 time starting up again and again. With the exception of the exec plugin no
339 processes are forked. Caching in output plugins, such as the rrdtool and
340 network plugins, makes sure your resources are used efficiently. Also,
341 since collectd is programmed multithreaded it benefits from hyperthreading
342 and multicore processors and makes sure that the daemon isn't idle if only
343 one plugins waits for an IO-operation to complete.
345 * Once set up, hardly any maintenance is necessary. Setup is kept as easy
346 as possible and the default values should be okay for most users.
349 Operation
350 ---------
352 * collectd's configuration file can be found at `sysconfdir'/collectd.conf.
353 Run `collectd -h' for a list of builtin defaults. See `collectd.conf(5)'
354 for a list of options and a syntax description.
356 * When the `csv' or `rrdtool' plugins are loaded they'll write the values to
357 files. The usual place for these files is beneath `/var/lib/collectd'.
359 * When using some of the plugins, collectd needs to run as user root, since
360 only root can do certain things, such as craft ICMP packages needed to ping
361 other hosts. collectd should NOT be installed setuid root since it can be
362 used to overwrite valuable files!
364 * Sample scripts to generate graphs reside in `contrib/' in the source
365 package or somewhere near `/usr/share/doc/collectd' in most distributions.
366 Please be aware that those script are meant as a starting point for your
367 own experiments.. Some of them require the `RRDs' Perl module.
368 (`librrds-perl' on Debian) If you have written a more sophisticated
369 solution please share it with us.
371 * The RRAs of the automatically created RRD files depend on the `step'
372 and `heartbeat' settings given. If change these settings you may need to
373 re-create the files, losing all data. Please be aware of that when changing
374 the values and read the rrdtool(1) manpage thoroughly.
377 collectd and chkrootkit
378 -----------------------
380 If you are using the `dns' plugin chkrootkit(1) will report collectd as a
381 packet sniffer ("<iface>: PACKET SNIFFER(/usr/sbin/collectd[<pid>])"). The
382 plugin captures all UDP packets on port 53 to analyze the DNS traffic. In
383 this case, collectd is a legitimate sniffer and the report should be
384 considered to be a false positive. However, you might want to check that
385 this really is collectd and not some other, illegitimate sniffer.
388 Prerequisites
389 -------------
391 To compile collectd from source you will need:
393 * Usual suspects: C compiler, linker, preprocessor, make, ...
395 * A POSIX-threads (pthread) implementation.
396 Since gathering some statistics is slow (network connections, slow devices,
397 etc) the collectd is parallelized. The POSIX threads interface is being
398 used and should be found in various implementations for hopefully all
399 platforms.
401 * CoreFoundation.framework and IOKit.framework (optional)
402 For compiling on Darwin in general and the `apple_sensors' plugin in
403 particular.
404 <http://developer.apple.com/corefoundation/>
406 * libclntsh (optional)
407 Used by the `oracle' plugin.
409 * libcurl (optional)
410 If you want to use the `apache', `ascent', `curl' or `nginx' plugin.
411 <http://curl.haxx.se/>
413 * libdbi (optional)
414 Used by the `dbi' plugin to connect to various databases.
415 <http://libdbi.sourceforge.net/>
417 * libesmtp (optional)
418 For the `notify_email' plugin.
419 <http://www.stafford.uklinux.net/libesmtp/>
421 * libhal (optional)
422 If present, the uuid plugin will check for UUID from HAL.
423 <http://hal.freedesktop.org/>
425 * libiptc (optional, if not found a version shipped with this distribution
426 can be used if the Linux kernel headers are available)
427 For querying iptables counters.
428 <http://netfilter.org/>
430 * libmysqlclient (optional)
431 Unsurprisingly used by the `mysql' plugin.
432 <http://dev.mysql.com/>
434 * libnetlink (optional)
435 Used, obviously, for the `netlink' plugin.
436 <http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Net:Iproute2>
438 * libnetsnmp (optional)
439 For the `snmp' plugin.
440 <http://www.net-snmp.org/>
442 * libnotify (optional)
443 For the `notify_desktop' plugin.
444 <http://www.galago-project.org/>
446 * liboping (optional, if not found a version shipped with this distribution
447 can be used)
448 Used by the `ping' plugin to send and receive ICMP packets.
449 <http://verplant.org/liboping/>
451 * libowcapi (optional)
452 Used by the `onewire' plugin to read values from onewire sensors (or the
453 owserver(1) daemon).
454 <http://www.owfs.org/>
456 * libpcap (optional)
457 Used to capture packets by the `dns' plugin.
458 <http://www.tcpdump.org/>
460 * libperl (optional)
461 Obviously used by the `perl' plugin. The library has to be compiled with
462 ithread support (introduced in Perl 5.6.0).
463 <http://www.perl.org/>
465 * libpq (optional)
466 The PostgreSQL C client library used by the `postgresql' plugin.
467 <http://www.postgresql.org/>
469 * librrd (optional)
470 Used by the `rrdtool' and `rrdcached' plugins. The latter requires RRDtool
471 client support which was added after version 1.3 of RRDtool. Versions 1.0,
472 1.2 and 1.3 are known to work with the `rrdtool' plugin.
473 <http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/>
475 * librt, libsocket, libkstat, libdevinfo (optional)
476 Various standard Solaris libraries which provide system functions.
477 <http://developers.sun.com/solaris/>
479 * libsensors (optional)
480 To read from `lm_sensors', see the `sensors' plugin.
481 <http://www.lm-sensors.org/>
483 * libstatgrab (optional)
484 Used by various plugins to collect statistics on systems other than Linux
485 and/or Solaris.
486 <http://www.i-scream.org/libstatgrab/>
488 * libupsclient/nut (optional)
489 For the `nut' plugin which queries nut's `upsd'.
490 <http://networkupstools.org/>
492 * libvirt (optional)
493 Collect statistics from virtual machines.
494 <http://libvirt.org/>
496 * libxml2 (optional)
497 Parse XML data. This is needed for the `ascent' and `libvirt' plugins.
498 <http://xmlsoft.org/>
500 * libxmms (optional)
501 <http://www.xmms.org/>
504 Configuring / Compiling / Installing
505 ------------------------------------
507 To configure, build and install collectd with the default settings, run
508 `./configure && make && make install'. For detailed, generic instructions
509 see INSTALL. For a complete list of configure options and their description,
510 run `./configure --help'.
512 By default, the configure script will check for all build dependencies and
513 disable all plugins whose requirements cannot be fulfilled (any other plugin
514 will be enabled). To enable a plugin, install missing dependencies (see
515 section `Prerequisites' above) and rerun `configure'. If you specify the
516 `--enable-<plugin>' configure option, the script will fail if the depen-
517 dencies for the specified plugin are not met. If you specify the
518 `--disable-<plugin>' configure option, the plugin will not be built. Both
519 options are meant for package maintainers and should not be used in everyday
520 situations.
522 By default, collectd will be installed into `/opt/collectd'. You can adjust
523 this setting by specifying the `--prefix' configure option - see INSTALL for
524 details. If you pass DESTDIR=<path> to `make install', <path> will be
525 prefixed to all installation directories. This might be useful when creating
526 packages for collectd.
529 Crosscompiling
530 --------------
532 To compile correctly collectd needs to be able to initialize static
533 variables to NAN (Not A Number). Some C libraries, especially the GNU
534 libc, have a problem with that.
536 Luckily, with GCC it's possible to work around that problem: One can define
537 NAN as being (0.0 / 0.0) and `isnan' as `f != f'. However, to test this
538 ``implementation'' the configure script needs to compile and run a short
539 test program. Obviously running a test program when doing a cross-
540 compilation is, well, challenging.
542 If you run into this problem, you can use the `--with-nan-emulation'
543 configure option to force the use of this implementation. We can't promise
544 that the compiled binary actually behaves as it should, but since NANs
545 are likely never passed to the libm you have a good chance to be lucky.
548 Contact
549 -------
551 For questions, bugreports, development information and basically all other
552 concerns please send an email to collectd's mailinglist at
553 <collectd at verplant.org>.
555 For live discussion and more personal contact visit us in IRC, we're in
556 channel #collectd on freenode.
559 Author
560 ------
562 Florian octo Forster <octo at verplant.org>,
563 Sebastian tokkee Harl <sh at tokkee.org>,
564 and many contributors (see `AUTHORS').
566 Please send bugreports and patches to the mailinglist, see `Contact' above.