aad6a702b2c194ac7fb0627411e6c1d2e6fa0fdc
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 - hddtemp
66 Harddisk temperatures using hddtempd.
68 - interface
69 Interface traffic: Number of octets, packets and errors for each
70 interface.
72 - iptables
73 Iptables' counters: Number of bytes that were matched by a certain
74 iptables rule.
76 - ipvs
77 IPVS connection statistics (number of connections, octets and packets
78 for each service and destination).
79 See http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/software/index.html.
81 - irq
82 IRQ counters: Frequency in which certain interrupts occur.
84 - load
85 System load average over the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes.
87 - libvirt
88 CPU, disk and network I/O statistics from virtual machines.
90 - mbmon
91 Motherboard sensors: temperature, fanspeed and voltage information,
92 using mbmon(1).
94 - memcached
95 Statistics of the memcached distributed caching system.
96 <http://www.danga.com/memcached/>
98 - memory
99 Memory utilization: Memory occupied by running processes, page cache,
100 buffer cache and free.
102 - multimeter
103 Information provided by serial multimeters, such as the `Metex
104 M-4650CR'.
106 - mysql
107 MySQL server statistics: Commands issued, handlers triggered, thread
108 usage, query cache utilization and traffic/octets sent and received.
110 - netlink
111 Very detailed Linux network interface and routing statistics. You can get
112 (detailed) information on interfaces, qdiscs, classes, and, if you can
113 make use of it, filters.
115 - network
116 Receive values that were collected by other hosts. Large setups will
117 want to collect the data on one dedicated machine, and this is the
118 plugin of choice for that.
120 - nfs
121 NFS Procedures: Which NFS command were called how often. Only NFSv2 and
122 NFSv3 right now.
124 - nginx
125 Collects statistics from `nginx' (speak: engine X), a HTTP and mail
126 server/proxy.
128 - ntpd
129 NTP daemon statistics: Local clock drift, offset to peers, etc.
131 - nut
132 Network UPS tools: UPS current, voltage, power, charge, utilisation,
133 temperature, etc. See upsd(8).
135 - perl
136 The perl plugin implements a Perl-interpreter into collectd. You can
137 write your own plugins in Perl and return arbitrary values using this
138 API. See collectd-perl(5).
140 - ping
141 Network latency: Time to reach the default gateway or another given
142 host.
144 - processes
145 Process counts: Number of running, sleeping, zombie, ... processes.
147 - sensors
148 System sensors, accessed using lm_sensors: Voltages, temperatures and
149 fan rotation speeds.
151 - serial
152 RX and TX of serial interfaces. Linux only; needs root privileges.
154 - snmp
155 Read values from SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) enabled
156 network devices such as switches, routers, thermometers, rack monitoring
157 servers, etc. See collectd-snmp(5).
159 - swap
160 Pages swapped out onto harddisk or whatever is called `swap' by the OS..
162 - tail
163 Follows (tails) logfiles, parses them by lines and submits matched
164 values.
166 - tape
167 Bytes and operations read and written on tape devices. Solaris only.
169 - tcpconns
170 Number of TCP connections to specific local and remote ports.
172 - users
173 Users currently logged in.
175 - vmem
176 Virtual memory statistics, e. g. the number of page-ins/-outs or the
177 number of pagefaults.
179 - vserver
180 System resources used by Linux VServers.
181 See <http://linux-vserver.org/>.
183 - wireless
184 Link quality of wireless cards. Linux only.
186 - xmms
187 Bitrate and frequency of music played with XMMS.
189 * Output can be written or send to various destinations by the following
190 plugins:
192 - csv
193 Write to comma separated values (CSV) files. This needs lots of
194 diskspace but is extremely portable and can be analysed with almost
195 every program that can analyse anything. Even Microsoft's Excel..
197 - network
198 Send the data to a remote host to save the data somehow. This is useful
199 for large setups where the data should be saved by a dedicated machine.
201 - perl
202 Of course the values are propagated to plugins written in Perl, too, so
203 you can easily do weird stuff with the plugins we didn't dare think of
204 ;) See collectd-perl(5).
206 - rrdtool
207 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using librrd. See rrdtool(1).
208 This is likely the most popular destination for such values. Since
209 updates to RRD-files are somewhat expensive this plugin can cache
210 updates to the files and write a bunch of updates at once, which lessens
211 system load a lot.
213 - unixsock
214 One can query the values from the unixsock plugin whenever they're
215 needed. Please read collectd-unixsock(5) for a description on how that's
216 done.
218 * Logging is, as everything in collectd, provided by plugins. The following
219 plugins keep up informed about what's going on:
221 - logfile
222 Writes logmessages to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
224 - perl
225 Log messages are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
226 See collectd-perl(5).
228 - syslog
229 Logs to the standard UNIX logging mechanism, syslog.
231 * Notifications can be handled by the following plugins:
233 - desktop_notification
234 Send a desktop notification to a notification daemon, as defined in
235 the Desktop Notification Specification. To actually display the
236 notifications, notification-daemon is required.
237 See http://www.galago-project.org/specs/notification/.
239 - exec
240 Execute a program or script to handle the notification.
241 See collectd-exec(5).
243 - logfile
244 Writes the notification message to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
246 - network
247 Send the notification to a remote host to handle it somehow.
249 - perl
250 Notifications are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
251 See collectd-perl(5).
253 * Miscellaneous plugins:
255 - uuid
256 Sets the hostname to an unique identifier. This is meant for setups
257 where each client may migrate to another physical host, possibly going
258 through one or more name changes in the process.
260 * Performance: Since collectd is running as a daemon it doesn't spend much
261 time starting up again and again. With the exception of the exec plugin no
262 processes are forked. Caching in output plugins, such as the rrdtool and
263 network plugins, makes sure your resources are used efficiently. Also,
264 since collectd is programmed multithreaded it benefits from hyperthreading
265 and multicore processors and makes sure that the daemon isn't idle if only
266 one plugins waits for an IO-operation to complete.
268 * Once set up, hardly any maintenance is necessary. Setup is kept as easy
269 as possible and the default values should be okay for most users.
272 Operation
273 ---------
275 * collectd's configuration file can be found at `sysconfdir'/collectd.conf.
276 Run `collectd -h' for a list of builtin defaults. See `collectd.conf(5)'
277 for a list of options and a syntax description.
279 * When the `csv' or `rrdtool' plugins are loaded they'll write the values to
280 files. The usual place for these files is beneath `/var/lib/collectd'.
282 * When using some of the plugins, collectd needs to run as user root, since
283 only root can do certain things, such as craft ICMP packages needed to ping
284 other hosts. collectd should NOT be installed setuid root since it can be
285 used to overwrite valuable files!
287 * Sample scripts to generate graphs reside in `contrib/' in the source
288 package or somewhere near `/usr/share/doc/collectd' in most distributions.
289 Please be aware that those script are meant as a starting point for your
290 own experiments.. Some of them require the `RRDs' Perl module.
291 (`librrds-perl' on Debian) If you have written a more sophisticated
292 solution please share it with us.
294 * The RRAs of the automatically created RRD files depend on the `step'
295 and `heartbeat' settings given. If change these settings you may need to
296 re-create the files, losing all data. Please be aware of that when changing
297 the values and read the rrdtool(1) manpage thoroughly.
300 collectd and chkrootkit
301 -----------------------
303 If you are using the `dns' plugin chkrootkit(1) will report collectd as a
304 packet sniffer ("<iface>: PACKET SNIFFER(/usr/sbin/collectd[<pid>])"). The
305 plugin captures all UDP packets on port 53 to analyze the DNS traffic. In
306 this case, collectd is a legitimate sniffer and the report should be
307 considered to be a false positive. However, you might want to check that
308 this really is collectd and not some other, illegitimate sniffer.
311 Prerequisites
312 -------------
314 To compile collectd from source you will need:
316 * Usual suspects: C compiler, linker, preprocessor, make, ...
318 * A POSIX-threads (pthread) implementation.
319 Since gathering some statistics is slow (network connections, slow devices,
320 etc) the collectd is parallelized. The POSIX threads interface is being
321 used and should be found in various implementations for hopefully all
322 platforms.
324 * libcurl (optional)
325 If you want to use the `apache', `ascent', or `nginx' plugin.
327 * libhal (optional)
328 If present, the uuid plugin will check for UUID from HAL.
330 * libiptc (optional)
331 For querying iptables counters.
333 * libmysqlclient (optional)
334 Unsurprisingly used by the `mysql' plugin.
336 * libnetlink (optional)
337 Used, obviously, for the `netlink' plugin.
339 * libnetsnmp (optional)
340 For the `snmp' plugin.
342 * libnotify (optional)
343 For the `desktop_notification' plugin.
345 * liboping (optional, if not found a version shipped with this distribution
346 can be used)
347 Used by the `ping' plugin to send and receive ICMP packets.
349 * libpcap (optional)
350 Used to capture packets by the `dns' plugin.
352 * libperl (optional)
353 Obviously used by the `perl' plugin. The library has to be compiled with
354 ithread support (introduced in Perl 5.6.0).
356 * librrd (optional; headers and library; rrdtool 1.0 and 1.2 both work fine)
357 If built without `librrd' the resulting binary will be `client only', i.e.
358 will send its values via multicast and not create any RRD files itself.
359 Alternatively you can chose to write CSV-files (Comma Separated Values)
360 instead.
362 * libsensors (optional)
363 To read from `lm_sensors', see the `sensors' plugin.
365 * libstatgrab may be used to collect statistics on systems other than Linux
366 and/or Solaris. Note that CPU- and disk-statistics, while being provided
367 by this library, are not supported in collectd right now..
368 <http://www.i-scream.org/libstatgrab/>
370 * libupsclient/nut (optional)
371 For the `nut' plugin which queries nut's `upsd'.
373 * libxmms (optional)
375 * librt, libsocket, libkstat, libdevinfo
376 Various standard Solaris libraries which provide system functions.
378 * CoreFoundation.framework and IOKit.framework
379 For compiling on Darwin in general and the `apple_sensors' plugin in
380 particular.
382 * libvirt (optional)
383 Collect statistics from virtual machines.
385 * libxml2 (optional)
386 Parse XML data. This is needed for the `ascent' and `libvirt' plugins.
389 Configuring / Compiling / Installing
390 ------------------------------------
392 To configure, build and install collectd with the default settings, run
393 `./configure && make && make install'. For detailed, generic instructions
394 see INSTALL. For a complete list of configure options and their description,
395 run `./configure --help'.
397 By default, the configure script will check for all build dependencies and
398 disable all plugins whose requirements cannot be fulfilled (any other plugin
399 will be enabled). To enable a plugin, install missing dependencies (see
400 section `Prerequisites' above) and rerun `configure'. If you specify the
401 `--enable-<plugin>' configure option, you can force the plugin to be built.
402 This will most likely fail though unless you're working in a very unusual
403 setup and you really know what you're doing.
405 By default, collectd will be installed into `/opt/collectd'. You can adjust
406 this setting by specifying the `--prefix' configure option - see INSTALL for
407 details. If you pass DESTDIR=<path> to `make install', <path> will be
408 prefixed to all installation directories. This might be useful when creating
409 packages for collectd.
412 Crosscompiling
413 --------------
415 To compile correctly collectd needs to be able to initialize static
416 variables to NAN (Not A Number). Some C libraries, especially the GNU
417 libc, have a problem with that.
419 Luckily, with GCC it's possible to work around that problem: One can define
420 NAN as being (0.0 / 0.0) and `isnan' as `f != f'. However, to test this
421 ``implementation'' the configure script needs to compile and run a short
422 test program. Obviously running a test program when doing a cross-
423 compilation is, well, challenging.
425 If you run into this problem, you can use the `--with-nan-emulation'
426 configure option to force the use of this implementation. We can't promise
427 that the compiled binary actually behaves as it should, but since NANs
428 are likely never passed to the libm you have a good chance to be lucky.
431 Contact
432 -------
434 For questions, bugreports, development information and basically all other
435 concerns please send an email to collectd's mailinglist at
436 <collectd at verplant.org>.
438 For live discussion and more personal contact visit us in IRC, we're in
439 channel #collectd on freenode.
442 Author
443 ------
445 Florian octo Forster <octo at verplant.org>,
446 Sebastian tokkee Harl <sh at tokkee.org>,
447 and many contributors (see `AUTHORS').
449 Please send bugreports and patches to the mailinglist, see `Contact' above.