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 - conntrack
44 Number of nf_conntrack entries.
46 - curl_json
47 Retrieves JSON data via cURL and parses it according to user
48 configuration.
50 - cpu
51 CPU utilization: Time spent in the system, user, nice, idle, and related
52 states.
54 - cpufreq
55 CPU frequency (For laptops with speed step or a similar technology)
57 - dbi
58 Executes SQL statements on various databases and interprets the returned
59 data.
61 - df
62 Mountpoint usage (Basically the values `df(1)' delivers)
64 - disk
65 Disk utilization: Sectors read/written, number of read/write actions,
66 average time an IO-operation took to complete.
68 - dns
69 DNS traffic: Query types, response codes, opcodes and traffic/octets
70 transfered.
72 - email
73 Email statistics: Count, traffic, spam scores and checks.
74 See collectd-email(5).
76 - entropy
77 Amount of entropy available to the system.
79 - exec
80 Values gathered by a custom program or script.
81 See collectd-exec(5).
83 - filecount
84 Count the number of files in directories.
86 - fscache
87 Linux file-system based caching framework statistics.
89 - gmond
90 Receive multicast traffic from Ganglia instances.
92 - hddtemp
93 Harddisk temperatures using hddtempd.
95 - interface
96 Interface traffic: Number of octets, packets and errors for each
97 interface.
99 - iptables
100 Iptables' counters: Number of bytes that were matched by a certain
101 iptables rule.
103 - ipmi
104 IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) sensors information.
106 - ipvs
107 IPVS connection statistics (number of connections, octets and packets
108 for each service and destination).
109 See http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/software/index.html.
111 - irq
112 IRQ counters: Frequency in which certain interrupts occur.
114 - java
115 Integrates a `Java Virtual Machine' (JVM) to execute plugins in Java
116 bytecode. See “Configuring with libjvm” below.
118 - load
119 System load average over the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes.
121 - libvirt
122 CPU, disk and network I/O statistics from virtual machines.
124 - mbmon
125 Motherboard sensors: temperature, fanspeed and voltage information,
126 using mbmon(1).
128 - memcachec
129 Query and parse data from a memcache daemon (memcached).
131 - memcached
132 Statistics of the memcached distributed caching system.
133 <http://www.danga.com/memcached/>
135 - memory
136 Memory utilization: Memory occupied by running processes, page cache,
137 buffer cache and free.
139 - multimeter
140 Information provided by serial multimeters, such as the `Metex
141 M-4650CR'.
143 - mysql
144 MySQL server statistics: Commands issued, handlers triggered, thread
145 usage, query cache utilization and traffic/octets sent and received.
147 - netlink
148 Very detailed Linux network interface and routing statistics. You can get
149 (detailed) information on interfaces, qdiscs, classes, and, if you can
150 make use of it, filters.
152 - network
153 Receive values that were collected by other hosts. Large setups will
154 want to collect the data on one dedicated machine, and this is the
155 plugin of choice for that.
157 - nfs
158 NFS Procedures: Which NFS command were called how often. Only NFSv2 and
159 NFSv3 right now.
161 - nginx
162 Collects statistics from `nginx' (speak: engine X), a HTTP and mail
163 server/proxy.
165 - ntpd
166 NTP daemon statistics: Local clock drift, offset to peers, etc.
168 - nut
169 Network UPS tools: UPS current, voltage, power, charge, utilisation,
170 temperature, etc. See upsd(8).
172 - onewire (EXPERIMENTAL!)
173 Read onewire sensors using the owcapu library of the owfs project.
174 Please read in collectd.conf(5) why this plugin is experimental.
176 - openvpn
177 RX and TX of each client in openvpn-status.log (status-version 2).
178 <http://openvpn.net/index.php/documentation/howto.html>
180 - oracle
181 Query data from an Oracle database.
183 - perl
184 The perl plugin implements a Perl-interpreter into collectd. You can
185 write your own plugins in Perl and return arbitrary values using this
186 API. See collectd-perl(5).
188 - ping
189 Network latency: Time to reach the default gateway or another given
190 host.
192 - postgresql
193 PostgreSQL database statistics: active server connections, transaction
194 numbers, block IO, table row manipulations.
196 - powerdns
197 PowerDNS name server statistics.
199 - processes
200 Process counts: Number of running, sleeping, zombie, ... processes.
202 - protocols
203 Counts various aspects of network protocols such as IP, TCP, UDP, etc.
205 - rrdcached
206 RRDtool caching daemon (RRDcacheD) statistics.
208 - sensors
209 System sensors, accessed using lm_sensors: Voltages, temperatures and
210 fan rotation speeds.
212 - serial
213 RX and TX of serial interfaces. Linux only; needs root privileges.
215 - snmp
216 Read values from SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) enabled
217 network devices such as switches, routers, thermometers, rack monitoring
218 servers, etc. See collectd-snmp(5).
220 - swap
221 Pages swapped out onto harddisk or whatever is called `swap' by the OS..
223 - table
224 Parse table-like structured files.
226 - tail
227 Follows (tails) logfiles, parses them by lines and submits matched
228 values.
230 - tape
231 Bytes and operations read and written on tape devices. Solaris only.
233 - tcpconns
234 Number of TCP connections to specific local and remote ports.
236 - teamspeak2
237 TeamSpeak2 server statistics.
239 - ted
240 Plugin to read values from `The Energy Detective' (TED).
242 - thermal
243 Linux ACPI thermal zone information.
245 - tokyotyrant
246 Record in and file size of a Tokyo Cabinet database file.
248 - uptime
249 System uptime statistics.
251 - users
252 Users currently logged in.
254 - vmem
255 Virtual memory statistics, e. g. the number of page-ins/-outs or the
256 number of pagefaults.
258 - vserver
259 System resources used by Linux VServers.
260 See <http://linux-vserver.org/>.
262 - wireless
263 Link quality of wireless cards. Linux only.
265 - write_http
266 Send data to a web-server using POST requests.
268 - xmms
269 Bitrate and frequency of music played with XMMS.
271 - zfs_arc
272 Statistics for ZFS' “Adaptive Replacement Cache” (ARC).
274 * Output can be written or send to various destinations by the following
275 plugins:
277 - csv
278 Write to comma separated values (CSV) files. This needs lots of
279 diskspace but is extremely portable and can be analysed with almost
280 every program that can analyse anything. Even Microsoft's Excel..
282 - network
283 Send the data to a remote host to save the data somehow. This is useful
284 for large setups where the data should be saved by a dedicated machine.
286 - perl
287 Of course the values are propagated to plugins written in Perl, too, so
288 you can easily do weird stuff with the plugins we didn't dare think of
289 ;) See collectd-perl(5).
291 - rrdcached
292 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using the RRDtool caching
293 daemon (RRDcacheD) - see rrdcached(1). That daemon provides a general
294 implementation of the caching done by the `rrdtool' plugin.
296 - rrdtool
297 Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using librrd. See rrdtool(1).
298 This is likely the most popular destination for such values. Since
299 updates to RRD-files are somewhat expensive this plugin can cache
300 updates to the files and write a bunch of updates at once, which lessens
301 system load a lot.
303 - unixsock
304 One can query the values from the unixsock plugin whenever they're
305 needed. Please read collectd-unixsock(5) for a description on how that's
306 done.
308 * Logging is, as everything in collectd, provided by plugins. The following
309 plugins keep up informed about what's going on:
311 - logfile
312 Writes logmessages to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
314 - perl
315 Log messages are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
316 See collectd-perl(5).
318 - syslog
319 Logs to the standard UNIX logging mechanism, syslog.
321 * Notifications can be handled by the following plugins:
323 - notify_desktop
324 Send a desktop notification to a notification daemon, as defined in
325 the Desktop Notification Specification. To actually display the
326 notifications, notification-daemon is required.
327 See http://www.galago-project.org/specs/notification/.
329 - notify_email
330 Send an E-mail with the notification message to the configured
331 recipients.
333 - exec
334 Execute a program or script to handle the notification.
335 See collectd-exec(5).
337 - logfile
338 Writes the notification message to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
340 - network
341 Send the notification to a remote host to handle it somehow.
343 - perl
344 Notifications are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well.
345 See collectd-perl(5).
347 * Value processing can be controlled using the "filter chain" infrastructure
348 and "matches" and "targets". The following plugins are available:
350 - match_empty_counter
351 Match counter values which are currently zero.
353 - match_regex
354 Match values by their identifier based on regular expressions.
356 - match_timediff
357 Match values with an invalid timestamp.
359 - match_value
360 Select values by their data sources' values.
362 - target_notification
363 Create and dispatch a notification.
365 - target_replace
366 Replace parts of an identifier using regular expressions.
368 - target_set
369 Set (overwrite) entire parts of an identifier.
371 * Miscellaneous plugins:
373 - uuid
374 Sets the hostname to an unique identifier. This is meant for setups
375 where each client may migrate to another physical host, possibly going
376 through one or more name changes in the process.
378 * Performance: Since collectd is running as a daemon it doesn't spend much
379 time starting up again and again. With the exception of the exec plugin no
380 processes are forked. Caching in output plugins, such as the rrdtool and
381 network plugins, makes sure your resources are used efficiently. Also,
382 since collectd is programmed multithreaded it benefits from hyperthreading
383 and multicore processors and makes sure that the daemon isn't idle if only
384 one plugins waits for an IO-operation to complete.
386 * Once set up, hardly any maintenance is necessary. Setup is kept as easy
387 as possible and the default values should be okay for most users.
390 Operation
391 ---------
393 * collectd's configuration file can be found at `sysconfdir'/collectd.conf.
394 Run `collectd -h' for a list of builtin defaults. See `collectd.conf(5)'
395 for a list of options and a syntax description.
397 * When the `csv' or `rrdtool' plugins are loaded they'll write the values to
398 files. The usual place for these files is beneath `/var/lib/collectd'.
400 * When using some of the plugins, collectd needs to run as user root, since
401 only root can do certain things, such as craft ICMP packages needed to ping
402 other hosts. collectd should NOT be installed setuid root since it can be
403 used to overwrite valuable files!
405 * Sample scripts to generate graphs reside in `contrib/' in the source
406 package or somewhere near `/usr/share/doc/collectd' in most distributions.
407 Please be aware that those script are meant as a starting point for your
408 own experiments.. Some of them require the `RRDs' Perl module.
409 (`librrds-perl' on Debian) If you have written a more sophisticated
410 solution please share it with us.
412 * The RRAs of the automatically created RRD files depend on the `step'
413 and `heartbeat' settings given. If change these settings you may need to
414 re-create the files, losing all data. Please be aware of that when changing
415 the values and read the rrdtool(1) manpage thoroughly.
418 collectd and chkrootkit
419 -----------------------
421 If you are using the `dns' plugin chkrootkit(1) will report collectd as a
422 packet sniffer ("<iface>: PACKET SNIFFER(/usr/sbin/collectd[<pid>])"). The
423 plugin captures all UDP packets on port 53 to analyze the DNS traffic. In
424 this case, collectd is a legitimate sniffer and the report should be
425 considered to be a false positive. However, you might want to check that
426 this really is collectd and not some other, illegitimate sniffer.
429 Prerequisites
430 -------------
432 To compile collectd from source you will need:
434 * Usual suspects: C compiler, linker, preprocessor, make, ...
436 * A POSIX-threads (pthread) implementation.
437 Since gathering some statistics is slow (network connections, slow devices,
438 etc) the collectd is parallelized. The POSIX threads interface is being
439 used and should be found in various implementations for hopefully all
440 platforms.
442 * CoreFoundation.framework and IOKit.framework (optional)
443 For compiling on Darwin in general and the `apple_sensors' plugin in
444 particular.
445 <http://developer.apple.com/corefoundation/>
447 * libclntsh (optional)
448 Used by the `oracle' plugin.
450 * libcurl (optional)
451 If you want to use the `apache', `ascent', `curl', `nginx', or `write_http'
452 plugin.
453 <http://curl.haxx.se/>
455 * libdbi (optional)
456 Used by the `dbi' plugin to connect to various databases.
457 <http://libdbi.sourceforge.net/>
459 * libesmtp (optional)
460 For the `notify_email' plugin.
461 <http://www.stafford.uklinux.net/libesmtp/>
463 * libganglia (optional)
464 Used by the `gmond' plugin to process data received from Ganglia.
466 * libgcrypt (optional)
467 Used by the `network' plugin for encryption and authentication.
469 * libhal (optional)
470 If present, the uuid plugin will check for UUID from HAL.
471 <http://hal.freedesktop.org/>
473 * libiptc (optional, if not found a version shipped with this distribution
474 can be used if the Linux kernel headers are available)
475 For querying iptables counters.
476 <http://netfilter.org/>
478 * libjvm (optional)
479 Library that encapsulates the `Java Virtual Machine' (JVM). This library is
480 used by the Java plugin to execute Java bytecode. See “Configuring with
481 libjvm” below.
483 * libmemcached (optional)
484 Used by the `memcachec' plugin to connect to a memcache daemon.
486 * libmysqlclient (optional)
487 Unsurprisingly used by the `mysql' plugin.
488 <http://dev.mysql.com/>
490 * libnetlink (optional)
491 Used, obviously, for the `netlink' plugin.
492 <http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Net:Iproute2>
494 * libnetsnmp (optional)
495 For the `snmp' plugin.
496 <http://www.net-snmp.org/>
498 * libnotify (optional)
499 For the `notify_desktop' plugin.
500 <http://www.galago-project.org/>
502 * liboping (optional, if not found a version shipped with this distribution
503 can be used)
504 Used by the `ping' plugin to send and receive ICMP packets.
505 <http://verplant.org/liboping/>
507 * libowcapi (optional)
508 Used by the `onewire' plugin to read values from onewire sensors (or the
509 owserver(1) daemon).
510 <http://www.owfs.org/>
512 * libpcap (optional)
513 Used to capture packets by the `dns' plugin.
514 <http://www.tcpdump.org/>
516 * libperl (optional)
517 Obviously used by the `perl' plugin. The library has to be compiled with
518 ithread support (introduced in Perl 5.6.0).
519 <http://www.perl.org/>
521 * libpq (optional)
522 The PostgreSQL C client library used by the `postgresql' plugin.
523 <http://www.postgresql.org/>
525 * librrd (optional)
526 Used by the `rrdtool' and `rrdcached' plugins. The latter requires RRDtool
527 client support which was added after version 1.3 of RRDtool. Versions 1.0,
528 1.2 and 1.3 are known to work with the `rrdtool' plugin.
529 <http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/>
531 * librt, libsocket, libkstat, libdevinfo (optional)
532 Various standard Solaris libraries which provide system functions.
533 <http://developers.sun.com/solaris/>
535 * libsensors (optional)
536 To read from `lm_sensors', see the `sensors' plugin.
537 <http://www.lm-sensors.org/>
539 * libstatgrab (optional)
540 Used by various plugins to collect statistics on systems other than Linux
541 and/or Solaris.
542 <http://www.i-scream.org/libstatgrab/>
544 * libupsclient/nut (optional)
545 For the `nut' plugin which queries nut's `upsd'.
546 <http://networkupstools.org/>
548 * libvirt (optional)
549 Collect statistics from virtual machines.
550 <http://libvirt.org/>
552 * libxml2 (optional)
553 Parse XML data. This is needed for the `ascent' and `libvirt' plugins.
554 <http://xmlsoft.org/>
556 * libxmms (optional)
557 <http://www.xmms.org/>
559 * libyajl (optional)
560 Parse JSON data. This is needed for the `curl_json' plugin.
561 <http://www.lloydforge.org/projects/yajl/>
563 Configuring / Compiling / Installing
564 ------------------------------------
566 To configure, build and install collectd with the default settings, run
567 `./configure && make && make install'. For detailed, generic instructions
568 see INSTALL. For a complete list of configure options and their description,
569 run `./configure --help'.
571 By default, the configure script will check for all build dependencies and
572 disable all plugins whose requirements cannot be fulfilled (any other plugin
573 will be enabled). To enable a plugin, install missing dependencies (see
574 section `Prerequisites' above) and rerun `configure'. If you specify the
575 `--enable-<plugin>' configure option, the script will fail if the depen-
576 dencies for the specified plugin are not met. In that case you can force the
577 plugin to be built using the `--enable-<plugin>=force' configure option.
578 This will most likely fail though unless you're working in a very unusual
579 setup and you really know what you're doing. If you specify the
580 `--disable-<plugin>' configure option, the plugin will not be built. If you
581 specify the `--enable-all-plugins' or `--disable-all-plugins' configure
582 options, all plugins will be enabled or disabled respectively by default.
583 Explicitly enabling or disabling a plugin overwrites the default for the
584 specified plugin. These options are meant for package maintainers and should
585 not be used in everyday situations.
587 By default, collectd will be installed into `/opt/collectd'. You can adjust
588 this setting by specifying the `--prefix' configure option - see INSTALL for
589 details. If you pass DESTDIR=<path> to `make install', <path> will be
590 prefixed to all installation directories. This might be useful when creating
591 packages for collectd.
593 Configuring with libjvm
594 -----------------------
596 To determine the location of the required files of a Java installation is not
597 an easy task, because the locations vary with your kernel (Linux, SunOS, …)
598 and with your architecture (x86, SPARC, …) and there is no ‘java-config’
599 script we could use. Configuration of the JVM library is therefore a bit
600 tricky.
602 The easiest way to use the `--with-java=$JAVA_HOME' option, where
603 `$JAVA_HOME' is usually something like:
604 /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0.14
606 The configure script will then use find(1) to look for the following files:
608 - jni.h
609 - jni_md.h
610 - libjvm.so
612 If found, appropriate CPP-flags and LD-flags are set and the following
613 library checks succeed.
615 If this doesn't work for you, you have the possibility to specify CPP-flags,
616 C-flags and LD-flags for the ‘Java’ plugin by hand, using the following three
617 (environment) variables:
619 - JAVA_CPPFLAGS
620 - JAVA_CFLAGS
621 - JAVA_LDFLAGS
623 For example (shortened for demonstration purposes):
625 ./configure JAVA_CPPFLAGS="-I$JAVA_HOME/include -I$JAVA_HOME/include/linux"
627 Adding "-ljvm" to the JAVA_LDFLAGS is done automatically, you don't have to
628 do that.
630 Crosscompiling
631 --------------
633 To compile correctly collectd needs to be able to initialize static
634 variables to NAN (Not A Number). Some C libraries, especially the GNU
635 libc, have a problem with that.
637 Luckily, with GCC it's possible to work around that problem: One can define
638 NAN as being (0.0 / 0.0) and `isnan' as `f != f'. However, to test this
639 ``implementation'' the configure script needs to compile and run a short
640 test program. Obviously running a test program when doing a cross-
641 compilation is, well, challenging.
643 If you run into this problem, you can use the `--with-nan-emulation'
644 configure option to force the use of this implementation. We can't promise
645 that the compiled binary actually behaves as it should, but since NANs
646 are likely never passed to the libm you have a good chance to be lucky.
648 Likewise, collectd needs to know the layout of doubles in memory, in order
649 to craft uniform network packets over different architectures. For this, it
650 needs to know how to convert doubles into the memory layout used by x86. The
651 configure script tries to figure this out by compiling and running a few
652 small test programs. This is of course not possible when cross-compiling.
653 You can use the `--with-fp-layout' option to tell the configure script which
654 conversion method to assume. Valid arguments are:
656 * `nothing' (12345678 -> 12345678)
657 * `endianflip' (12345678 -> 87654321)
658 * `intswap' (12345678 -> 56781234)
661 Contact
662 -------
664 For questions, bug reports, development information and basically all other
665 concerns please send an email to collectd's mailing list at
666 <collectd at verplant.org>.
668 For live discussion and more personal contact visit us in IRC, we're in
669 channel #collectd on freenode.
672 Author
673 ------
675 Florian octo Forster <octo at verplant.org>,
676 Sebastian tokkee Harl <sh at tokkee.org>,
677 and many contributors (see `AUTHORS').
679 Please send bug reports and patches to the mailing list, see `Contact'
680 above.