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 - rrdcached
183 RRDtool caching daemon (RRDcacheD) statistics.
185 - sensors
186 System sensors, accessed using lm_sensors: Voltages, temperatures and
187 fan rotation speeds.
189 - serial
190 RX and TX of serial interfaces. Linux only; needs root privileges.
192 - snmp
193 Read values from SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) enabled
194 network devices such as switches, routers, thermometers, rack monitoring
195 servers, etc. See collectd-snmp(5).
197 - swap
198 Pages swapped out onto harddisk or whatever is called `swap' by the OS..
200 - tail
201 Follows (tails) logfiles, parses them by lines and submits matched
202 values.
204 - tape
205 Bytes and operations read and written on tape devices. Solaris only.
207 - tcpconns
208 Number of TCP connections to specific local and remote ports.
210 - teamspeak2
211 TeamSpeak2 server statistics.
213 - thermal
214 Linux ACPI thermal zone information.
216 - users
217 Users currently logged in.
219 - vmem
220 Virtual memory statistics, e. g. the number of page-ins/-outs or the
221 number of pagefaults.
223 - vserver
224 System resources used by Linux VServers.
225 See <http://linux-vserver.org/>.
227 - wireless
228 Link quality of wireless cards. Linux only.
230 - xmms
231 Bitrate and frequency of music played with XMMS.
233 * Output can be written or send to various destinations by the following
234 plugins:
236 - csv
237 Write to comma separated values (CSV) files. This needs lots of
238 diskspace but is extremely portable and can be analysed with almost
239 every program that can analyse anything. Even Microsoft's Excel..
241 - network
242 Send the data to a remote host to save the data somehow. This is useful
243 for large setups where the data should be saved by a dedicated machine.
245 - perl
246 Of course the values are propagated to plugins written in Perl, too, so
247 you can easily do weird stuff with the plugins we didn't dare think of
248 ;) See collectd-perl(5).
250 - rrdcached
251 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using the RRDtool caching
252 daemon (RRDcacheD) - see rrdcached(1). That daemon provides a general
253 implementation of the caching done by the `rrdtool' plugin.
255 - rrdtool
256 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using librrd. See rrdtool(1).
257 This is likely the most popular destination for such values. Since
258 updates to RRD-files are somewhat expensive this plugin can cache
259 updates to the files and write a bunch of updates at once, which lessens
260 system load a lot.
262 - unixsock
263 One can query the values from the unixsock plugin whenever they're
264 needed. Please read collectd-unixsock(5) for a description on how that's
265 done.
267 * Logging is, as everything in collectd, provided by plugins. The following
268 plugins keep up informed about what's going on:
270 - logfile
271 Writes logmessages to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
273 - perl
274 Log messages are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
275 See collectd-perl(5).
277 - syslog
278 Logs to the standard UNIX logging mechanism, syslog.
280 * Notifications can be handled by the following plugins:
282 - notify_desktop
283 Send a desktop notification to a notification daemon, as defined in
284 the Desktop Notification Specification. To actually display the
285 notifications, notification-daemon is required.
286 See http://www.galago-project.org/specs/notification/.
288 - notify_email
289 Send an E-mail with the notification message to the configured
290 recipients.
292 - exec
293 Execute a program or script to handle the notification.
294 See collectd-exec(5).
296 - logfile
297 Writes the notification message to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
299 - network
300 Send the notification to a remote host to handle it somehow.
302 - perl
303 Notifications are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
304 See collectd-perl(5).
306 * Value processing can be controlled using the "filter chain" infrastructure
307 and "matches" and "targets". The following plugins are available:
309 - match_regex
310 Match values by their identifier based on regular expressions.
312 - match_timediff
313 Match values with an invalid timestamp.
315 - match_value
316 Select values by their data sources' values.
318 - target_notification
319 Create and dispatch a notification.
321 - target_replace
322 Replace parts of an identifier using regular expressions.
324 - target_set
325 Set (overwrite) entire parts of an identifier.
327 * Miscellaneous plugins:
329 - uuid
330 Sets the hostname to an unique identifier. This is meant for setups
331 where each client may migrate to another physical host, possibly going
332 through one or more name changes in the process.
334 * Performance: Since collectd is running as a daemon it doesn't spend much
335 time starting up again and again. With the exception of the exec plugin no
336 processes are forked. Caching in output plugins, such as the rrdtool and
337 network plugins, makes sure your resources are used efficiently. Also,
338 since collectd is programmed multithreaded it benefits from hyperthreading
339 and multicore processors and makes sure that the daemon isn't idle if only
340 one plugins waits for an IO-operation to complete.
342 * Once set up, hardly any maintenance is necessary. Setup is kept as easy
343 as possible and the default values should be okay for most users.
346 Operation
347 ---------
349 * collectd's configuration file can be found at `sysconfdir'/collectd.conf.
350 Run `collectd -h' for a list of builtin defaults. See `collectd.conf(5)'
351 for a list of options and a syntax description.
353 * When the `csv' or `rrdtool' plugins are loaded they'll write the values to
354 files. The usual place for these files is beneath `/var/lib/collectd'.
356 * When using some of the plugins, collectd needs to run as user root, since
357 only root can do certain things, such as craft ICMP packages needed to ping
358 other hosts. collectd should NOT be installed setuid root since it can be
359 used to overwrite valuable files!
361 * Sample scripts to generate graphs reside in `contrib/' in the source
362 package or somewhere near `/usr/share/doc/collectd' in most distributions.
363 Please be aware that those script are meant as a starting point for your
364 own experiments.. Some of them require the `RRDs' Perl module.
365 (`librrds-perl' on Debian) If you have written a more sophisticated
366 solution please share it with us.
368 * The RRAs of the automatically created RRD files depend on the `step'
369 and `heartbeat' settings given. If change these settings you may need to
370 re-create the files, losing all data. Please be aware of that when changing
371 the values and read the rrdtool(1) manpage thoroughly.
374 collectd and chkrootkit
375 -----------------------
377 If you are using the `dns' plugin chkrootkit(1) will report collectd as a
378 packet sniffer ("<iface>: PACKET SNIFFER(/usr/sbin/collectd[<pid>])"). The
379 plugin captures all UDP packets on port 53 to analyze the DNS traffic. In
380 this case, collectd is a legitimate sniffer and the report should be
381 considered to be a false positive. However, you might want to check that
382 this really is collectd and not some other, illegitimate sniffer.
385 Prerequisites
386 -------------
388 To compile collectd from source you will need:
390 * Usual suspects: C compiler, linker, preprocessor, make, ...
392 * A POSIX-threads (pthread) implementation.
393 Since gathering some statistics is slow (network connections, slow devices,
394 etc) the collectd is parallelized. The POSIX threads interface is being
395 used and should be found in various implementations for hopefully all
396 platforms.
398 * CoreFoundation.framework and IOKit.framework (optional)
399 For compiling on Darwin in general and the `apple_sensors' plugin in
400 particular.
401 <http://developer.apple.com/corefoundation/>
403 * libclntsh (optional)
404 Used by the `oracle' plugin.
406 * libcurl (optional)
407 If you want to use the `apache', `ascent', `curl' or `nginx' plugin.
408 <http://curl.haxx.se/>
410 * libdbi (optional)
411 Used by the `dbi' plugin to connect to various databases.
412 <http://libdbi.sourceforge.net/>
414 * libesmtp (optional)
415 For the `notify_email' plugin.
416 <http://www.stafford.uklinux.net/libesmtp/>
418 * libhal (optional)
419 If present, the uuid plugin will check for UUID from HAL.
420 <http://hal.freedesktop.org/>
422 * libiptc (optional, if not found a version shipped with this distribution
423 can be used if the Linux kernel headers are available)
424 For querying iptables counters.
425 <http://netfilter.org/>
427 * libmysqlclient (optional)
428 Unsurprisingly used by the `mysql' plugin.
429 <http://dev.mysql.com/>
431 * libnetlink (optional)
432 Used, obviously, for the `netlink' plugin.
433 <http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Net:Iproute2>
435 * libnetsnmp (optional)
436 For the `snmp' plugin.
437 <http://www.net-snmp.org/>
439 * libnotify (optional)
440 For the `notify_desktop' plugin.
441 <http://www.galago-project.org/>
443 * liboping (optional, if not found a version shipped with this distribution
444 can be used)
445 Used by the `ping' plugin to send and receive ICMP packets.
446 <http://verplant.org/liboping/>
448 * libowcapi (optional)
449 Used by the `onewire' plugin to read values from onewire sensors (or the
450 owserver(1) daemon).
451 <http://www.owfs.org/>
453 * libpcap (optional)
454 Used to capture packets by the `dns' plugin.
455 <http://www.tcpdump.org/>
457 * libperl (optional)
458 Obviously used by the `perl' plugin. The library has to be compiled with
459 ithread support (introduced in Perl 5.6.0).
460 <http://www.perl.org/>
462 * libpq (optional)
463 The PostgreSQL C client library used by the `postgresql' plugin.
464 <http://www.postgresql.org/>
466 * librrd (optional)
467 Used by the `rrdtool' and `rrdcached' plugins. The latter requires RRDtool
468 client support which was added after version 1.3 of RRDtool. Versions 1.0,
469 1.2 and 1.3 are known to work with the `rrdtool' plugin.
470 <http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/>
472 * librt, libsocket, libkstat, libdevinfo (optional)
473 Various standard Solaris libraries which provide system functions.
474 <http://developers.sun.com/solaris/>
476 * libsensors (optional)
477 To read from `lm_sensors', see the `sensors' plugin.
478 <http://www.lm-sensors.org/>
480 * libstatgrab (optional)
481 Used by various plugins to collect statistics on systems other than Linux
482 and/or Solaris.
483 <http://www.i-scream.org/libstatgrab/>
485 * libupsclient/nut (optional)
486 For the `nut' plugin which queries nut's `upsd'.
487 <http://networkupstools.org/>
489 * libvirt (optional)
490 Collect statistics from virtual machines.
491 <http://libvirt.org/>
493 * libxml2 (optional)
494 Parse XML data. This is needed for the `ascent' and `libvirt' plugins.
495 <http://xmlsoft.org/>
497 * libxmms (optional)
498 <http://www.xmms.org/>
501 Configuring / Compiling / Installing
502 ------------------------------------
504 To configure, build and install collectd with the default settings, run
505 `./configure && make && make install'. For detailed, generic instructions
506 see INSTALL. For a complete list of configure options and their description,
507 run `./configure --help'.
509 By default, the configure script will check for all build dependencies and
510 disable all plugins whose requirements cannot be fulfilled (any other plugin
511 will be enabled). To enable a plugin, install missing dependencies (see
512 section `Prerequisites' above) and rerun `configure'. If you specify the
513 `--enable-<plugin>' configure option, the script will fail if the depen-
514 dencies for the specified plugin are not met. If you specify the
515 `--disable-<plugin>' configure option, the plugin will not be built. Both
516 options are meant for package maintainers and should not be used in everyday
517 situations.
519 By default, collectd will be installed into `/opt/collectd'. You can adjust
520 this setting by specifying the `--prefix' configure option - see INSTALL for
521 details. If you pass DESTDIR=<path> to `make install', <path> will be
522 prefixed to all installation directories. This might be useful when creating
523 packages for collectd.
526 Crosscompiling
527 --------------
529 To compile correctly collectd needs to be able to initialize static
530 variables to NAN (Not A Number). Some C libraries, especially the GNU
531 libc, have a problem with that.
533 Luckily, with GCC it's possible to work around that problem: One can define
534 NAN as being (0.0 / 0.0) and `isnan' as `f != f'. However, to test this
535 ``implementation'' the configure script needs to compile and run a short
536 test program. Obviously running a test program when doing a cross-
537 compilation is, well, challenging.
539 If you run into this problem, you can use the `--with-nan-emulation'
540 configure option to force the use of this implementation. We can't promise
541 that the compiled binary actually behaves as it should, but since NANs
542 are likely never passed to the libm you have a good chance to be lucky.
544 Likewise, collectd needs to know the layout of doubles in memory, in order
545 to craft uniform network packets over different architectures. For this, it
546 needs to know how to convert doubles into the memory layout used by x86. The
547 configure script tries to figure this out by compiling and running a few
548 small test programs. This is of course not possible when cross-compiling.
549 You can use the `--with-fp-layout' option to tell the configure script which
550 conversion method to assume. Valid arguments are:
552 * `nothing' (12345678 -> 12345678)
553 * `endianflip' (12345678 -> 87654321)
554 * `intswap' (12345678 -> 56781234)
557 Contact
558 -------
560 For questions, bug reports, development information and basically all other
561 concerns please send an email to collectd's mailing list at
562 <collectd at verplant.org>.
564 For live discussion and more personal contact visit us in IRC, we're in
565 channel #collectd on freenode.
568 Author
569 ------
571 Florian octo Forster <octo at verplant.org>,
572 Sebastian tokkee Harl <sh at tokkee.org>,
573 and many contributors (see `AUTHORS').
575 Please send bug reports and patches to the mailing list, see `Contact'
576 above.