collectd is a small daemon which collects system information periodically and provides mechanisms to store and monitor the values in a variety of ways.
collectd is able to collect the following data:
apache Apache server utilization: Number of bytes transfered, number of requests handled and detailed scoreboard statistics
apcups APC UPS Daemon: UPS charge, load, input/output/battery voltage, etc.
apple_sensors Sensors in Macs running Mac OS X / Darwin: Temperature, fanspeed and voltage sensors.
ascent Statistics about Ascent, a free server for the game `World of Warcraft'.
battery Batterycharge, -current and voltage of ACPI and PMU based laptop batteries.
bind Name server and resolver statistics from the `statistics-channel' interface of BIND 9.5, 9,6 and later.
conntrack Number of nf_conntrack entries.
contextswitch Number of context switches done by the operating system.
cpu CPU utilization: Time spent in the system, user, nice, idle, and related states.
cpufreq CPU frequency (For laptops with speed step or a similar technology)
curl Parse statistics from websites using regular expressions.
curl_json Retrieves JSON data via cURL and parses it according to user configuration.
curl_xml Retrieves XML data via cURL and parses it according to user configuration.
dbi Executes SQL statements on various databases and interprets the returned data.
df Mountpoint usage (Basically the values `df(1)' delivers)
disk Disk utilization: Sectors read/written, number of read/write actions, average time an IO-operation took to complete.
dns DNS traffic: Query types, response codes, opcodes and traffic/octets transfered.
email Email statistics: Count, traffic, spam scores and checks. See collectd-email(5).
entropy Amount of entropy available to the system.
ethstat Network interface card statistics.
exec Values gathered by a custom program or script. See collectd-exec(5).
filecount Count the number of files in directories.
fscache Linux file-system based caching framework statistics.
gmond Receive multicast traffic from Ganglia instances.
hddtemp Harddisk temperatures using hddtempd.
interface Interface traffic: Number of octets, packets and errors for each interface.
iptables Iptables' counters: Number of bytes that were matched by a certain iptables rule.
ipmi IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) sensors information.
ipvs IPVS connection statistics (number of connections, octets and packets for each service and destination). See http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/software/index.html.
irq IRQ counters: Frequency in which certain interrupts occur.
java Integrates a `Java Virtual Machine' (JVM) to execute plugins in Java bytecode. See “Configuring with libjvm” below.
load System load average over the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes.
lpar Detailed CPU statistics of the “Logical Partitions” virtualization technique built into IBM's POWER processors.
libvirt CPU, disk and network I/O statistics from virtual machines.
madwifi Queries very detailed usage statistics from wireless LAN adapters and interfaces that use the Atheros chipset and the MadWifi driver.
mbmon Motherboard sensors: temperature, fanspeed and voltage information, using mbmon(1).
md Linux software-RAID device information (number of active, failed, spare and missing disks).
memcachec Query and parse data from a memcache daemon (memcached).
memcached Statistics of the memcached distributed caching system. http://www.danga.com/memcached/
memory Memory utilization: Memory occupied by running processes, page cache, buffer cache and free.
modbus Reads values from Modbus/TCP enabled devices. Supports reading values from multiple "slaves" so gateway devices can be used.
multimeter Information provided by serial multimeters, such as the `Metex M-4650CR'.
mysql MySQL server statistics: Commands issued, handlers triggered, thread usage, query cache utilization and traffic/octets sent and received.
netapp Plugin to query performance values from a NetApp storage system using the “Manage ONTAP” SDK provided by NetApp.
netlink Very detailed Linux network interface and routing statistics. You can get (detailed) information on interfaces, qdiscs, classes, and, if you can make use of it, filters.
network Receive values that were collected by other hosts. Large setups will want to collect the data on one dedicated machine, and this is the plugin of choice for that.
nfs NFS Procedures: Which NFS command were called how often. Only NFSv2 and NFSv3 right now.
nginx Collects statistics from `nginx' (speak: engine X), a HTTP and mail server/proxy.
ntpd NTP daemon statistics: Local clock drift, offset to peers, etc.
nut Network UPS tools: UPS current, voltage, power, charge, utilisation, temperature, etc. See upsd(8).
numa Information about Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA).
olsrd Queries routing information from the “Optimized Link State Routing” daemon.
onewire (EXPERIMENTAL!) Read onewire sensors using the owcapu library of the owfs project. Please read in collectd.conf(5) why this plugin is experimental.
openvpn RX and TX of each client in openvpn-status.log (status-version 2). http://openvpn.net/index.php/documentation/howto.html
oracle Query data from an Oracle database.
perl The perl plugin implements a Perl-interpreter into collectd. You can write your own plugins in Perl and return arbitrary values using this API. See collectd-perl(5).
pf Query statistics from BSD's packet filter "pf".
pinba Receive and dispatch timing values from Pinba, a profiling extension for PHP.
ping Network latency: Time to reach the default gateway or another given host.
postgresql PostgreSQL database statistics: active server connections, transaction numbers, block IO, table row manipulations.
powerdns PowerDNS name server statistics.
processes Process counts: Number of running, sleeping, zombie, ... processes.
protocols Counts various aspects of network protocols such as IP, TCP, UDP, etc.
python The python plugin implements a Python interpreter into collectd. This makes it possible to write plugins in Python which are executed by collectd without the need to start a heavy interpreter every interval. See collectd-python(5) for details.
redis The redis plugin gathers information from a redis server, including: uptime, used memory, total connections etc.
routeros Query interface and wireless registration statistics from RouterOS.
rrdcached RRDtool caching daemon (RRDcacheD) statistics.
sensors System sensors, accessed using lm_sensors: Voltages, temperatures and fan rotation speeds.
serial RX and TX of serial interfaces. Linux only; needs root privileges.
snmp Read values from SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) enabled network devices such as switches, routers, thermometers, rack monitoring servers, etc. See collectd-snmp(5).
swap Pages swapped out onto harddisk or whatever is called `swap' by the OS..
table Parse table-like structured files.
tail Follows (tails) logfiles, parses them by lines and submits matched values.
tape Bytes and operations read and written on tape devices. Solaris only.
tcpconns Number of TCP connections to specific local and remote ports.
teamspeak2 TeamSpeak2 server statistics.
ted Plugin to read values from `The Energy Detective' (TED).
thermal Linux ACPI thermal zone information.
tokyotyrant Reads the number of records and file size from a running Tokyo Tyrant server.
uptime System uptime statistics.
users Users currently logged in.
varnish Various statistics from Varnish, an HTTP accelerator.
vmem Virtual memory statistics, e. g. the number of page-ins/-outs or the number of pagefaults.
vserver System resources used by Linux VServers. See http://linux-vserver.org/.
wireless Link quality of wireless cards. Linux only.
xmms Bitrate and frequency of music played with XMMS.
zfs_arc Statistics for ZFS' “Adaptive Replacement Cache” (ARC).
Output can be written or sent to various destinations by the following plugins:
amqp Sends JSON-encoded data to an Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) server, such as RabbitMQ.
csv Write to comma separated values (CSV) files. This needs lots of diskspace but is extremely portable and can be analysed with almost every program that can analyse anything. Even Microsoft's Excel..
network Send the data to a remote host to save the data somehow. This is useful for large setups where the data should be saved by a dedicated machine.
perl Of course the values are propagated to plugins written in Perl, too, so you can easily do weird stuff with the plugins we didn't dare think of ;) See collectd-perl(5).
python It's possible to implement write plugins in Python using the python plugin. See collectd-python(5) for details.
rrdcached Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using the RRDtool caching daemon (RRDcacheD) - see rrdcached(1). That daemon provides a general implementation of the caching done by the `rrdtool' plugin.
rrdtool Output to round-robin-database (RRD) files using librrd. See rrdtool(1). This is likely the most popular destination for such values. Since updates to RRD-files are somewhat expensive this plugin can cache updates to the files and write a bunch of updates at once, which lessens system load a lot.
unixsock One can query the values from the unixsock plugin whenever they're needed. Please read collectd-unixsock(5) for a description on how that's done.
write_graphite Sends data to Carbon, the storage layer of Graphite.
write_http Sends the values collected by collectd to a web-server using HTTP POST requests. The transmitted data is either in a form understood by the Exec plugin or formatted in JSON.
write_mongodb Sends data to MongoDB, a NoSQL database.
write_redis Sends the values to a Redis key-value database server.
write_riemann Sends data to Riemann, a stream processing and monitoring system.
Logging is, as everything in collectd, provided by plugins. The following plugins keep up informed about what's going on:
logfile Writes logmessages to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
perl Log messages are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well. See collectd-perl(5).
python It's possible to implement log plugins in Python using the python plugin. See collectd-python(5) for details.
syslog Logs to the standard UNIX logging mechanism, syslog.
Notifications can be handled by the following plugins:
notify_desktop Send a desktop notification to a notification daemon, as defined in the Desktop Notification Specification. To actually display the notifications, notification-daemon is required. See http://www.galago-project.org/specs/notification/.
notify_email Send an E-mail with the notification message to the configured recipients.
exec Execute a program or script to handle the notification. See collectd-exec(5).
logfile Writes the notification message to a file or STDOUT/STDERR.
network Send the notification to a remote host to handle it somehow.
perl Notifications are propagated to plugins written in Perl as well. See collectd-perl(5).
python It's possible to implement notification plugins in Python using the python plugin. See collectd-python(5) for details.
Value processing can be controlled using the "filter chain" infrastructure and "matches" and "targets". The following plugins are available:
match_empty_counter Match counter values which are currently zero.
match_hashed Match values using a hash function of the hostname.
match_regex Match values by their identifier based on regular expressions.
match_timediff Match values with an invalid timestamp.
match_value Select values by their data sources' values.
target_notification Create and dispatch a notification.
target_replace Replace parts of an identifier using regular expressions.
target_scale Scale (multiply) values by an arbitrary value.
target_set Set (overwrite) entire parts of an identifier.
Miscellaneous plugins:
aggregation Selects multiple value lists based on patterns or regular expressions and creates new aggregated values lists from those.
threshold Checks values against configured thresholds and creates notifications if values are out of bounds. See collectd-threshold(5) for details.
uuid Sets the hostname to an unique identifier. This is meant for setups where each client may migrate to another physical host, possibly going through one or more name changes in the process.
Performance: Since collectd is running as a daemon it doesn't spend much time starting up again and again. With the exception of the exec plugin no processes are forked. Caching in output plugins, such as the rrdtool and network plugins, makes sure your resources are used efficiently. Also, since collectd is programmed multithreaded it benefits from hyperthreading and multicore processors and makes sure that the daemon isn't idle if only one plugin waits for an IO-operation to complete.
Once set up, hardly any maintenance is necessary. Setup is kept as easy as possible and the default values should be okay for most users.
collectd's configuration file can be found at sysconfdir'/collectd.conf. Runcollectd -h' for a list of builtin defaults. See `collectd.conf(5)'
for a list of options and a syntax description.
When the csv' orrrdtool' plugins are loaded they'll write the values to
files. The usual place for these files is beneath `/var/lib/collectd'.
When using some of the plugins, collectd needs to run as user root, since only root can do certain things, such as craft ICMP packages needed to ping other hosts. collectd should NOT be installed setuid root since it can be used to overwrite valuable files!
Sample scripts to generate graphs reside in contrib/' in the source package or somewhere near/usr/share/doc/collectd' in most distributions.
Please be aware that those script are meant as a starting point for your
own experiments.. Some of them require the RRDs' Perl module. (librrds-perl' on Debian) If you have written a more sophisticated
solution please share it with us.
The RRAs of the automatically created RRD files depend on the step' andheartbeat' settings given. If change these settings you may need to
re-create the files, losing all data. Please be aware of that when changing
the values and read the rrdtool(1) manpage thoroughly.
If you are using the `dns' plugin chkrootkit(1) will report collectd as a
packet sniffer ("
To compile collectd from source you will need:
Usual suspects: C compiler, linker, preprocessor, make, ...
A POSIX-threads (pthread) implementation. Since gathering some statistics is slow (network connections, slow devices, etc) the collectd is parallelized. The POSIX threads interface is being used and should be found in various implementations for hopefully all platforms.
CoreFoundation.framework and IOKit.framework (optional) For compiling on Darwin in general and the `apple_sensors' plugin in particular. http://developer.apple.com/corefoundation/
libclntsh (optional) Used by the `oracle' plugin.
libcredis (optional) Used by the redis plugin. Please note that you require a 0.2.2 version or higher. http://code.google.com/p/credis/
libcurl (optional)
If you want to use the apache',ascent', curl',nginx', or `write_http'
plugin.
http://curl.haxx.se/
libdbi (optional) Used by the `dbi' plugin to connect to various databases. http://libdbi.sourceforge.net/
libesmtp (optional) For the `notify_email' plugin. http://www.stafford.uklinux.net/libesmtp/
libganglia (optional) Used by the `gmond' plugin to process data received from Ganglia. http://ganglia.info/
libgcrypt (optional) Used by the `network' plugin for encryption and authentication. http://www.gnupg.org/
libhal (optional) If present, the uuid plugin will check for UUID from HAL. http://hal.freedesktop.org/
libiptc (optional) For querying iptables counters. http://netfilter.org/
If not found on the system, a version shipped with this distribution can be used. It requires some Linux headers in /usr/include/linux. You can force the build system to use the shipped version by specifying --with-libiptc=shipped when running the configure script.
libjvm (optional) Library that encapsulates the `Java Virtual Machine' (JVM). This library is used by the Java plugin to execute Java bytecode. See “Configuring with libjvm” below. http://openjdk.java.net/ (and others)
libmemcached (optional) Used by the `memcachec' plugin to connect to a memcache daemon. http://tangent.org/552/libmemcached.html
libmodbus (optional) Used by the “modbus” plugin to communicate with Modbus/TCP devices. The “modbus” plugin works with version 2.0.3 of the library – due to frequent API changes other versions may or may not compile cleanly. http://www.libmodbus.org/
libmysqlclient (optional) Unsurprisingly used by the `mysql' plugin. http://dev.mysql.com/
libnetapp (optional) Required for the “netapp” plugin. This library is part of the “Manage ONTAP SDK” published by NetApp.
libnetlink (optional) Used, obviously, for the `netlink' plugin. http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Net:Iproute2
libnetsnmp (optional) For the `snmp' plugin. http://www.net-snmp.org/
libnotify (optional) For the `notify_desktop' plugin. http://www.galago-project.org/
liboping (optional) Used by the `ping' plugin to send and receive ICMP packets. http://verplant.org/liboping/
libowcapi (optional) Used by the `onewire' plugin to read values from onewire sensors (or the owserver(1) daemon). http://www.owfs.org/
libpcap (optional) Used to capture packets by the `dns' plugin. http://www.tcpdump.org/
libperfstat (optional) Used by various plugins to gather statistics under AIX.
libperl (optional) Obviously used by the `perl' plugin. The library has to be compiled with ithread support (introduced in Perl 5.6.0). http://www.perl.org/
libpq (optional) The PostgreSQL C client library used by the `postgresql' plugin. http://www.postgresql.org/
libprotobuf-c, protoc-c (optional) Used by the `pinba' plugin to generate a parser for the network packets sent by the Pinba PHP extension. http://code.google.com/p/protobuf-c/
libpython (optional) Used by the `python' plugin. Currently, Python 2.3 and later and Python 3 are supported. http://www.python.org/
librabbitmq (optional; also called “rabbitmq-c”) Used by the AMQP plugin for AMQP connections, for example to RabbitMQ. http://hg.rabbitmq.com/rabbitmq-c/
librouteros (optional)
Used by the routeros' plugin to connect to a device runningRouterOS'.
http://verplant.org/librouteros/
librrd (optional)
Used by the rrdtool' andrrdcached' plugins. The latter requires RRDtool
client support which was added after version 1.3 of RRDtool. Versions 1.0,
1.2 and 1.3 are known to work with the `rrdtool' plugin.
http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/
librt, libsocket, libkstat, libdevinfo (optional) Various standard Solaris libraries which provide system functions. http://developers.sun.com/solaris/
libsensors (optional)
To read from lm_sensors', see thesensors' plugin.
http://www.lm-sensors.org/
libstatgrab (optional) Used by various plugins to collect statistics on systems other than Linux and/or Solaris. http://www.i-scream.org/libstatgrab/
libtokyotyrant (optional) Used by the tokyotyrant plugin. http://1978th.net/tokyotyrant/
libupsclient/nut (optional)
For the nut' plugin which queries nut'supsd'.
http://networkupstools.org/
libvirt (optional) Collect statistics from virtual machines. http://libvirt.org/
libxml2 (optional)
Parse XML data. This is needed for the ascent' andlibvirt' plugins.
http://xmlsoft.org/
libxmms (optional) http://www.xmms.org/
libyajl (optional) Parse JSON data. This is needed for the `curl_json' plugin. http://github.com/lloyd/yajl
libvarnish (optional) Fetches statistics from a Varnish instance. This is needed for the Varnish plugin http://varnish-cache.org
To configure, build and install collectd with the default settings, run
./configure && make && make install'. For detailed, generic instructions see INSTALL. For a complete list of configure options and their description, run./configure --help'.
By default, the configure script will check for all build dependencies and
disable all plugins whose requirements cannot be fulfilled (any other plugin
will be enabled). To enable a plugin, install missing dependencies (see
section Prerequisites' above) and rerunconfigure'. If you specify the
--enable-<plugin>' configure option, the script will fail if the depen- dencies for the specified plugin are not met. In that case you can force the plugin to be built using the--enable---disable-<plugin>' configure option, the plugin will not be built. If you specify the--enable-all-plugins' or `--disable-all-plugins' configure
options, all plugins will be enabled or disabled respectively by default.
Explicitly enabling or disabling a plugin overwrites the default for the
specified plugin. These options are meant for package maintainers and should
not be used in everyday situations.
By default, collectd will be installed into /opt/collectd'. You can adjust this setting by specifying the--prefix' configure option - see INSTALL for
details. If you pass DESTDIR=
To determine the location of the required files of a Java installation is not an easy task, because the locations vary with your kernel (Linux, SunOS, …) and with your architecture (x86, SPARC, …) and there is no ‘java-config’ script we could use. Configuration of the JVM library is therefore a bit tricky.
The easiest way to use the --with-java=$JAVA_HOME' option, where $JAVA_HOME' is usually something like:
/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0.14
The configure script will then use find(1) to look for the following files:
- jni.h
- jni_md.h
- libjvm.soIf found, appropriate CPP-flags and LD-flags are set and the following library checks succeed.
If this doesn't work for you, you have the possibility to specify CPP-flags, C-flags and LD-flags for the ‘Java’ plugin by hand, using the following three (environment) variables:
- JAVA_CPPFLAGS
- JAVA_CFLAGS
- JAVA_LDFLAGSFor example (shortened for demonstration purposes):
./configure JAVA_CPPFLAGS="-I$JAVA_HOME/include -I$JAVA_HOME/include/linux"Adding "-ljvm" to the JAVA_LDFLAGS is done automatically, you don't have to do that.
To compile correctly collectd needs to be able to initialize static variables to NAN (Not A Number). Some C libraries, especially the GNU libc, have a problem with that.
Luckily, with GCC it's possible to work around that problem: One can define
NAN as being (0.0 / 0.0) and isnan' asf != f'. However, to test this
``implementation'' the configure script needs to compile and run a short
test program. Obviously running a test program when doing a cross-
compilation is, well, challenging.
If you run into this problem, you can use the `--with-nan-emulation' configure option to force the use of this implementation. We can't promise that the compiled binary actually behaves as it should, but since NANs are likely never passed to the libm you have a good chance to be lucky.
Likewise, collectd needs to know the layout of doubles in memory, in order to craft uniform network packets over different architectures. For this, it needs to know how to convert doubles into the memory layout used by x86. The configure script tries to figure this out by compiling and running a few small test programs. This is of course not possible when cross-compiling. You can use the `--with-fp-layout' option to tell the configure script which conversion method to assume. Valid arguments are:
* `nothing' (12345678 -> 12345678)
* `endianflip' (12345678 -> 87654321)
* `intswap' (12345678 -> 56781234)For questions, bug reports, development information and basically all other concerns please send an email to collectd's mailing list at