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 - onewire
136 Read onewire sensors using the owcapu library of the owfs project.
138 - perl
139 The perl plugin implements a Perl-interpreter into collectd. You can
140 write your own plugins in Perl and return arbitrary values using this
141 API. See collectd-perl(5).
143 - ping
144 Network latency: Time to reach the default gateway or another given
145 host.
147 - postgresql
148 PostgreSQL database statistics: active server connections, transaction
149 numbers, block IO, table row manipulations.
151 - processes
152 Process counts: Number of running, sleeping, zombie, ... processes.
154 - sensors
155 System sensors, accessed using lm_sensors: Voltages, temperatures and
156 fan rotation speeds.
158 - serial
159 RX and TX of serial interfaces. Linux only; needs root privileges.
161 - snmp
162 Read values from SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) enabled
163 network devices such as switches, routers, thermometers, rack monitoring
164 servers, etc. See collectd-snmp(5).
166 - swap
167 Pages swapped out onto harddisk or whatever is called `swap' by the OS..
169 - tail
170 Follows (tails) logfiles, parses them by lines and submits matched
171 values.
173 - tape
174 Bytes and operations read and written on tape devices. Solaris only.
176 - tcpconns
177 Number of TCP connections to specific local and remote ports.
179 - users
180 Users currently logged in.
182 - vmem
183 Virtual memory statistics, e. g. the number of page-ins/-outs or the
184 number of pagefaults.
186 - vserver
187 System resources used by Linux VServers.
188 See <http://linux-vserver.org/>.
190 - wireless
191 Link quality of wireless cards. Linux only.
193 - xmms
194 Bitrate and frequency of music played with XMMS.
196 * Output can be written or send to various destinations by the following
197 plugins:
199 - csv
200 Write to comma separated values (CSV) files. This needs lots of
201 diskspace but is extremely portable and can be analysed with almost
202 every program that can analyse anything. Even Microsoft's Excel..
204 - network
205 Send the data to a remote host to save the data somehow. This is useful
206 for large setups where the data should be saved by a dedicated machine.
208 - perl
209 Of course the values are propagated to plugins written in Perl, too, so
210 you can easily do weird stuff with the plugins we didn't dare think of
211 ;) See collectd-perl(5).
213 - rrdtool
214 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using librrd. See rrdtool(1).
215 This is likely the most popular destination for such values. Since
216 updates to RRD-files are somewhat expensive this plugin can cache
217 updates to the files and write a bunch of updates at once, which lessens
218 system load a lot.
220 - unixsock
221 One can query the values from the unixsock plugin whenever they're
222 needed. Please read collectd-unixsock(5) for a description on how that's
223 done.
225 * Logging is, as everything in collectd, provided by plugins. The following
226 plugins keep up informed about what's going on:
228 - logfile
229 Writes logmessages to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
231 - perl
232 Log messages are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
233 See collectd-perl(5).
235 - syslog
236 Logs to the standard UNIX logging mechanism, syslog.
238 * Notifications can be handled by the following plugins:
240 - notify_desktop
241 Send a desktop notification to a notification daemon, as defined in
242 the Desktop Notification Specification. To actually display the
243 notifications, notification-daemon is required.
244 See http://www.galago-project.org/specs/notification/.
246 - notify_email
247 Send an E-mail with the notification message to the configured
248 recipients.
250 - exec
251 Execute a program or script to handle the notification.
252 See collectd-exec(5).
254 - logfile
255 Writes the notification message to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
257 - network
258 Send the notification to a remote host to handle it somehow.
260 - perl
261 Notifications are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
262 See collectd-perl(5).
264 * Miscellaneous plugins:
266 - uuid
267 Sets the hostname to an unique identifier. This is meant for setups
268 where each client may migrate to another physical host, possibly going
269 through one or more name changes in the process.
271 * Performance: Since collectd is running as a daemon it doesn't spend much
272 time starting up again and again. With the exception of the exec plugin no
273 processes are forked. Caching in output plugins, such as the rrdtool and
274 network plugins, makes sure your resources are used efficiently. Also,
275 since collectd is programmed multithreaded it benefits from hyperthreading
276 and multicore processors and makes sure that the daemon isn't idle if only
277 one plugins waits for an IO-operation to complete.
279 * Once set up, hardly any maintenance is necessary. Setup is kept as easy
280 as possible and the default values should be okay for most users.
283 Operation
284 ---------
286 * collectd's configuration file can be found at `sysconfdir'/collectd.conf.
287 Run `collectd -h' for a list of builtin defaults. See `collectd.conf(5)'
288 for a list of options and a syntax description.
290 * When the `csv' or `rrdtool' plugins are loaded they'll write the values to
291 files. The usual place for these files is beneath `/var/lib/collectd'.
293 * When using some of the plugins, collectd needs to run as user root, since
294 only root can do certain things, such as craft ICMP packages needed to ping
295 other hosts. collectd should NOT be installed setuid root since it can be
296 used to overwrite valuable files!
298 * Sample scripts to generate graphs reside in `contrib/' in the source
299 package or somewhere near `/usr/share/doc/collectd' in most distributions.
300 Please be aware that those script are meant as a starting point for your
301 own experiments.. Some of them require the `RRDs' Perl module.
302 (`librrds-perl' on Debian) If you have written a more sophisticated
303 solution please share it with us.
305 * The RRAs of the automatically created RRD files depend on the `step'
306 and `heartbeat' settings given. If change these settings you may need to
307 re-create the files, losing all data. Please be aware of that when changing
308 the values and read the rrdtool(1) manpage thoroughly.
311 collectd and chkrootkit
312 -----------------------
314 If you are using the `dns' plugin chkrootkit(1) will report collectd as a
315 packet sniffer ("<iface>: PACKET SNIFFER(/usr/sbin/collectd[<pid>])"). The
316 plugin captures all UDP packets on port 53 to analyze the DNS traffic. In
317 this case, collectd is a legitimate sniffer and the report should be
318 considered to be a false positive. However, you might want to check that
319 this really is collectd and not some other, illegitimate sniffer.
322 Prerequisites
323 -------------
325 To compile collectd from source you will need:
327 * Usual suspects: C compiler, linker, preprocessor, make, ...
329 * A POSIX-threads (pthread) implementation.
330 Since gathering some statistics is slow (network connections, slow devices,
331 etc) the collectd is parallelized. The POSIX threads interface is being
332 used and should be found in various implementations for hopefully all
333 platforms.
335 * CoreFoundation.framework and IOKit.framework (optional)
336 For compiling on Darwin in general and the `apple_sensors' plugin in
337 particular.
339 * libcurl (optional)
340 If you want to use the `apache', `ascent', or `nginx' plugin.
342 * libesmtp (optional)
343 For the `notify_email' plugin.
345 * libhal (optional)
346 If present, the uuid plugin will check for UUID from HAL.
348 * libiptc (optional)
349 For querying iptables counters.
351 * libmysqlclient (optional)
352 Unsurprisingly used by the `mysql' plugin.
354 * libnetlink (optional)
355 Used, obviously, for the `netlink' plugin.
357 * libnetsnmp (optional)
358 For the `snmp' plugin.
360 * libnotify (optional)
361 For the `notify_desktop' plugin.
363 * liboping (optional, if not found a version shipped with this distribution
364 can be used)
365 Used by the `ping' plugin to send and receive ICMP packets.
367 * libowcapi (optional)
368 Used by the `onewire' plugin to read values from onewire sensors (or the
369 owserver(1) daemon).
371 * libpcap (optional)
372 Used to capture packets by the `dns' plugin.
374 * libperl (optional)
375 Obviously used by the `perl' plugin. The library has to be compiled with
376 ithread support (introduced in Perl 5.6.0).
378 * libpq (optional)
379 The PostgreSQL C client library used by the `postgresql' plugin.
381 * librrd (optional; headers and library; rrdtool 1.0 and 1.2 both work fine)
382 If built without `librrd' the resulting binary will be `client only', i.e.
383 will send its values via multicast and not create any RRD files itself.
384 Alternatively you can chose to write CSV-files (Comma Separated Values)
385 instead.
387 * librt, libsocket, libkstat, libdevinfo (optional)
388 Various standard Solaris libraries which provide system functions.
390 * libsensors (optional)
391 To read from `lm_sensors', see the `sensors' plugin.
393 * libstatgrab (optional) may be used to collect statistics on systems other
394 than Linux and/or Solaris. Note that CPU- and disk-statistics, while being
395 provided by this library, are not supported in collectd right now..
396 <http://www.i-scream.org/libstatgrab/>
398 * libupsclient/nut (optional)
399 For the `nut' plugin which queries nut's `upsd'.
401 * libvirt (optional)
402 Collect statistics from virtual machines.
404 * libxml2 (optional)
405 Parse XML data. This is needed for the `ascent' and `libvirt' plugins.
407 * libxmms (optional)
410 Configuring / Compiling / Installing
411 ------------------------------------
413 To configure, build and install collectd with the default settings, run
414 `./configure && make && make install'. For detailed, generic instructions
415 see INSTALL. For a complete list of configure options and their description,
416 run `./configure --help'.
418 By default, the configure script will check for all build dependencies and
419 disable all plugins whose requirements cannot be fulfilled (any other plugin
420 will be enabled). To enable a plugin, install missing dependencies (see
421 section `Prerequisites' above) and rerun `configure'. If you specify the
422 `--enable-<plugin>' configure option, you can force the plugin to be built.
423 This will most likely fail though unless you're working in a very unusual
424 setup and you really know what you're doing.
426 By default, collectd will be installed into `/opt/collectd'. You can adjust
427 this setting by specifying the `--prefix' configure option - see INSTALL for
428 details. If you pass DESTDIR=<path> to `make install', <path> will be
429 prefixed to all installation directories. This might be useful when creating
430 packages for collectd.
433 Crosscompiling
434 --------------
436 To compile correctly collectd needs to be able to initialize static
437 variables to NAN (Not A Number). Some C libraries, especially the GNU
438 libc, have a problem with that.
440 Luckily, with GCC it's possible to work around that problem: One can define
441 NAN as being (0.0 / 0.0) and `isnan' as `f != f'. However, to test this
442 ``implementation'' the configure script needs to compile and run a short
443 test program. Obviously running a test program when doing a cross-
444 compilation is, well, challenging.
446 If you run into this problem, you can use the `--with-nan-emulation'
447 configure option to force the use of this implementation. We can't promise
448 that the compiled binary actually behaves as it should, but since NANs
449 are likely never passed to the libm you have a good chance to be lucky.
452 Contact
453 -------
455 For questions, bugreports, development information and basically all other
456 concerns please send an email to collectd's mailinglist at
457 <collectd at verplant.org>.
459 For live discussion and more personal contact visit us in IRC, we're in
460 channel #collectd on freenode.
463 Author
464 ------
466 Florian octo Forster <octo at verplant.org>,
467 Sebastian tokkee Harl <sh at tokkee.org>,
468 and many contributors (see `AUTHORS').
470 Please send bugreports and patches to the mailinglist, see `Contact' above.