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
18 Apache server utilization: Number of bytes transfered, number of
19 requests handled and detailed scoreboard statistics
21 - apcups
22 APC UPS Daemon: UPS charge, load, input/output/battery voltage, etc.
24 - apple_sensors
25 Sensors in Macs running Mac OS X / Darwin: Temperature, fanspeed and
26 voltage sensors.
28 - battery
29 Batterycharge, -current and voltage of ACPI and PMU based laptop
30 batteries.
32 - cpu
33 CPU utilization: Time spent in the system, user, nice, idle, and related
34 states.
36 - cpufreq
37 CPU frequency (For laptops with speed step or a similar technology)
39 - df
40 Mountpoint usage (Basically the values `df(1)' delivers)
42 - disk
43 Disk utilization: Sectors read/written, number of read/write actions,
44 average time an IO-operation took to complete.
46 - dns
47 DNS traffic: Query types, response codes, opcodes and traffic/octets
48 transfered.
50 - email
51 Email statistics: Count, traffic, spam scores and checks.
52 See collectd-email(5).
54 - entropy
55 Amount of entropy available to the system.
57 - exec
58 Values gathered by a custom program or script.
59 See collectd-exec(5).
61 - hddtemp
62 Harddisk temperatures using hddtempd.
64 - interface
65 Interface traffic: Number of octets, packets and errors for each
66 interface.
68 - iptables
69 Iptables' counters: Number of bytes that were matched by a certain
70 iptables rule.
72 - ipvs
73 IPVS connection statistics (number of connections, octets and packets
74 for each service and destination).
75 See http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/software/index.html.
77 - irq
78 IRQ counters: Frequency in which certain interrupts occur.
80 - load
81 System load average over the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes.
83 - libvirt
84 CPU, disk and network I/O statistics from virtual machines.
86 - mbmon
87 Motherboard sensors: temperature, fanspeed and voltage information,
88 using mbmon(1).
90 - memcached
91 Statistics of the memcached distributed caching system.
92 <http://www.danga.com/memcached/>
94 - memory
95 Memory utilization: Memory occupied by running processes, page cache,
96 buffer cache and free.
98 - multimeter
99 Information provided by serial multimeters, such as the `Metex
100 M-4650CR'.
102 - mysql
103 MySQL server statistics: Commands issued, handlers triggered, thread
104 usage, query cache utilization and traffic/octets sent and received.
106 - netlink
107 Very detailed Linux network interface and routing statistics. You can get
108 (detailed) information on interfaces, qdiscs, classes, and, if you can
109 make use of it, filters.
111 - network
112 Receive values that were collected by other hosts. Large setups will
113 want to collect the data on one dedicated machine, and this is the
114 plugin of choice for that.
116 - nfs
117 NFS Procedures: Which NFS command were called how often. Only NFSv2 and
118 NFSv3 right now.
120 - nginx
121 Collects statistics from `nginx' (speak: engine X), a HTTP and mail
122 server/proxy.
124 - ntp
125 NTP daemon statistics: Local clock drift, offset to peers, etc.
127 - nut
128 Network UPS tools: UPS current, voltage, power, charge, utilisation,
129 temperature, etc. See upsd(8).
131 - perl
132 The perl plugin implements a Perl-interpreter into collectd. You can
133 write your own plugins in Perl and return arbitrary values using this
134 API. See collectd-perl(5).
136 This plugin is still considered to be experimental and subject to change
137 between minor releases.
139 - ping
140 Network latency: Time to reach the default gateway or another given
141 host.
143 - processes
144 Process counts: Number of running, sleeping, zombie, ... processes.
146 - sensors
147 System sensors, accessed using lm_sensors: Voltages, temperatures and
148 fan rotation speeds.
150 - serial
151 RX and TX of serial interfaces. Linux only; needs root privileges.
153 - snmp
154 Read values from SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) enabled
155 network devices such as switches, routers, thermometers, rack monitoring
156 servers, etc. See collectd-snmp(5).
158 - swap
159 Pages swapped out onto harddisk or whatever is called `swap' by the OS..
161 - tape
162 Bytes and operations read and written on tape devices. Solaris only.
164 - tcpconns
165 Number of TCP connections to specific local and remote ports.
167 - users
168 Users currently logged in.
170 - vserver
171 System resources used by Linux VServers.
172 See <http://linux-vserver.org/>.
174 - wireless
175 Link quality of wireless cards. Linux only.
177 - xmms
178 Bitrate and frequency of music played with XMMS.
180 * Output can be written or send to various destinations by the following
181 plugins:
183 - csv
184 Write to comma separated values (CSV) files. This needs lots of
185 diskspace but is extremely portable and can be analysed with almost
186 every program that can analyse anything. Even Microsoft's Excel..
188 - network
189 Send the data to a remote host to save the data somehow. This is useful
190 for large setups where the data should be saved by a dedicated machine.
192 - perl
193 Of course the values are propagated to plugins written in Perl, too, so
194 you can easily do weird stuff with the plugins we didn't dare think of
195 ;) See collectd-perl(5).
197 - rrdtool
198 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using librrd. See rrdtool(1).
199 This is likely the most popular destination for such values. Since
200 updates to RRD-files are somewhat expensive this plugin can cache
201 updates to the files and write a bunch of updates at once, which lessens
202 system load a lot.
204 - unixsock
205 One can query the values from the unixsock plugin whenever they're
206 needed. Please read collectd-unixsock(5) for a description on how that's
207 done.
209 * Logging is, as everything in collectd, provided by plugins. The following
210 plugins keep up informed about what's going on:
212 - logfile
213 Writes logmessages to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
215 - syslog
216 Logs to the standard UNIX logging mechanism, syslog.
218 * Performance: Since collectd is running as a daemon it doesn't spend much
219 time starting up again and again. With the exception of the exec plugin no
220 processes are forked. Caching in output plugins, such as the rrdtool and
221 network plugins, makes sure your resources are used efficiently. Also,
222 since collectd is programmed multithreaded it benefits from hyperthreading
223 and multicore processors and makes sure that the daemon isn't idle if only
224 one plugins waits for an IO-operation to complete.
226 * Once set up, hardly any maintenance is necessary. Setup is kept as easy
227 as possible and the default values should be okay for most users.
230 Operation
231 ---------
233 * collectd's configuration file can be found at `sysconfdir'/collectd.conf.
234 Run `collectd -h' for a list of builtin defaults. See `collectd.conf(5)'
235 for a list of options and a syntax description.
237 * When the `csv' or `rrdtool' plugins are loaded they'll write the values to
238 files. The usual place for these files is beneath `/var/lib/collectd'.
240 * When using some of the plugins, collectd needs to run as user root, since
241 only root can do certain things, such as craft ICMP packages needed to ping
242 other hosts. collectd should NOT be installed setuid root since it can be
243 used to overwrite valuable files!
245 * Sample scripts to generate graphs reside in `contrib/' in the source
246 package or somewhere near `/usr/share/doc/collectd' in most distributions.
247 Please be aware that those script are meant as a starting point for your
248 own experiments.. Some of them require the `RRDs' Perl module.
249 (`librrds-perl' on Debian) If you have written a more sophisticated
250 solution please share it with us.
252 * The RRAs of the automatically created RRD files depend on the `step'
253 and `heartbeat' settings given. If change these settings you may need to
254 re-create the files, losing all data. Please be aware of that when changing
255 the values and read the rrdtool(1) manpage thoroughly.
258 collectd and chkrootkit
259 -----------------------
261 If you are using the `dns' plugin chkrootkit(1) will report collectd as a
262 packet sniffer ("<iface>: PACKET SNIFFER(/usr/sbin/collectd[<pid>])"). The
263 plugin captures all UDP packets on port 53 to analyze the DNS traffic. In
264 this case, collectd is a legitimate sniffer and the report should be
265 considered to be a false positive. However, you might want to check that
266 this really is collectd and not some other, illegitimate sniffer.
269 Prerequisites
270 -------------
272 To compile collectd from source you will need:
274 * Usual suspects: C compiler, linker, preprocessor, make, ...
276 * A POSIX-threads (pthread) implementation.
277 Since gathering some statistics is slow (network connections, slow devices,
278 etc) the collectd is parallelized. The POSIX threads interface is being
279 used and should be found in various implementations for hopefully all
280 platforms.
282 * libcurl (optional)
283 If you want to use the `apache' and/or `nginx' plugins.
285 * libiptc (optional)
286 For querying iptables counters.
288 * libmysqlclient (optional)
289 Unsurprisingly used by the `mysql' plugin.
291 * libnetlink (optional)
292 Used, obviously, for the `netlink' plugin.
294 * libnetsnmp (optional)
295 For the `snmp' plugin.
297 * liboping (optional, if not found a version shipped with this distribution
298 can be used)
299 Used by the `ping' plugin to send and receive ICMP packets.
301 * libpcap (optional)
302 Used to capture packets by the `dns' plugin.
304 * libperl (optional)
305 Obviously used by the `perl' plugin. The library has to be compiled with
306 ithread support (introduced in Perl 5.6.0).
308 * librrd (optional; headers and library; rrdtool 1.0 and 1.2 both work fine)
309 If built without `librrd' the resulting binary will be `client only', i.e.
310 will send its values via multicast and not create any RRD files itself.
311 Alternatively you can chose to write CSV-files (Comma Separated Values)
312 instead.
314 * libsensors (optional)
315 To read from `lm_sensors', see the `sensors' plugin.
317 * libstatgrab may be used to collect statistics on systems other than Linux
318 and/or Solaris. Note that CPU- and disk-statistics, while being provided
319 by this library, are not supported in collectd right now..
320 <http://www.i-scream.org/libstatgrab/>
322 * libupsclient/nut (optional)
323 For the `nut' plugin which queries nut's `upsd'.
325 * libxmms (optional)
327 * librt, libsocket, libkstat, libdevinfo
328 Various standard Solaris libraries which provide system functions.
330 * CoreFoundation.framework and IOKit.framework
331 For compiling on Darwin in general and the `apple_sensors' plugin in
332 particular.
334 * libvirt (optional)
335 Collect statistics from virtual machines.
338 Configuring / Compiling / Installing
339 ------------------------------------
341 To configure, build and install collectd with the default settings, run
342 `./configure && make && make install'. For detailed, generic instructions
343 see INSTALL. For a complete list of configure options and their description,
344 run `./configure --help'.
346 By default, the configure script will check for all build dependencies and
347 disable all plugins whose requirements cannot be fulfilled (any other plugin
348 will be enabled). To enable a plugin, install missing dependencies (see
349 section `Prerequisites' above) and rerun `configure'. If you specify the
350 `--enable-<plugin>' configure option, you can force the plugin to be built.
351 This will most likely fail though unless you're working in a very unusual
352 setup and you really know what you're doing.
354 By default, collectd will be installed into `/opt/collectd'. You can adjust
355 this setting by specifying the `--prefix' configure option - see INSTALL for
356 details. If you pass DESTDIR=<path> to `make install', <path> will be
357 prefixed to all installation directories. This might be useful when creating
358 packages for collectd.
361 Crosscompiling
362 --------------
364 To compile correctly collectd needs to be able to initialize static
365 variables to NAN (Not A Number). Some C libraries, especially the GNU
366 libc, have a problem with that.
368 Luckily, with GCC it's possible to work around that problem: One can define
369 NAN as being (0.0 / 0.0) and `isnan' as `f != f'. However, to test this
370 ``implementation'' the configure script needs to compile and run a short
371 test program. Obviously running a test program when doing a cross-
372 compilation is, well, challenging.
374 If you run into this problem, you can use the `--with-nan-emulation'
375 configure option to force the use of this implementation. We can't promise
376 that the compiled binary actually behaves as it should, but since NANs
377 are likely never passed to the libm you have a good chance to be lucky.
380 Contact
381 -------
383 For questions, bugreports, development information and basically all other
384 concerns please send an email to collectd's mailinglist at
385 <collectd at verplant.org>.
387 For live discussion and more personal contact visit us in IRC, we're in
388 channel #collectd on freenode.
391 Author
392 ------
394 Florian octo Forster <octo at verplant.org>,
395 Sebastian tokkee Harl <sh at tokkee.org>,
396 and many contributors (see `AUTHORS').
398 Please send bugreports and patches to the mailinglist, see `Contact' above.