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Features

Modularity / Portability

Everything in collectd is done in plugins. Well, except parsing the configfile. This means that the main daemon doesn't have any external dependencies and should run on nearly anything that has heard of POSIX. The daemon has been reported as working on Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, AIX, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. It's likely that other UNIX flavors work to some extend, too.

Support for Microsoft Windows is provided by SSC Serv, a native Windows service that implements collectd's network protocol.

Reasonable defaults

collectd's configuration is kept as easy as possible: Besides which modules to load you don't need to configure anything else, but you can customize the daemon to your liking if you want.

High-resolution statistics

In contrast to most similar software, collectd is not a script but written in plain C for performance and portability. As a daemon it stays in memory, so there is no need to start up a heavy interpreter every time new values should be logged. This allows collectd to have a 10 second default resolution while being nice to the system. It runs on small embedded WLAN routers with OpenWrt without much impact on the CPU. The result are very high resolution graphics. The sample graph gives you an idea of the detail you can expect. Please note that this is a ten-minute sample!

Sophisticated network code

collectd utilizes a data push model, i.e. the data is collected and sent (pushed) to a multicast group or server. Thus there is no central instance which queries any values.

The network code can use the advanced network technologies IPv6 and Multicast. But of course you can use collectd without any of this knickknack (i.e. IPv4 unicast ;), too. Since you can configure data transmission and reception separately, you can realize the following setups easily (see the networking introduction for more details):

• No networking: If you don't load the network plugin, networking is completely disabled. No sockets, no overhead, no problem.
• Multicast: Data can be sent to or received from a multicast group. This is the easiest and most interesting solution if you have many "clients" and one or a few "servers" on a local network. Using multicast is trivial: Simply enter a multicast address and any "server" will automatically recognize it and join the specific group.
• Unicast: Of course you can simply send data to specific hosts only. This is mostly interesting for scattered hosts – network wise.
• Proxy operation: An instance can be configured to forward the data it received over the network. Using this you can forward the data received from a multicast group to a unicast address, couple two distinct multicast groups without the need for (extra-AS) multicast routing and so on. Of course, IPv4/IPv6 can be wildly mixed with this, too.

The network protocol has been designed to be lightweight, so data collection over slow network links isn't a problem. The protocol is extensible, so it's open for new features in the future without breaking backwards compatibility.

Beginning with version 4.7, the network plugin offers cryptographic extensions to sign or encrypt network traffic. Servers can be instructed to only accept signed or encrypted traffic, so that information cannot be forged and, in case of encrypted data, read.

Using multicast can be thought of as “auto discovery”: The server doesn't (need to) know what clients exists (it never does) and the clients don't need to know the server's IP-address. In fact, they don't even know how many servers there are. You can think of it like radio communication: Once set to the right channel you can receive all the data transmitted by some senders – no matter what their position is.

Custom extensions

There is a variety of means by which you can extend the functionality of collectd to your needs:

• C-plugins: These plugins are compiled to shared objects and can be loaded by the daemon directly. These plugins possibly have the longest development cycle, but it is the best performing and most elegant solution, too.
• Perl-plugins: The Perl plugin includes a Perl-interpreter into the daemon which provides the C-interface to Perl-modules. This makes it possible to write additions in Perl. collectd-perl(5) has the juicy details.
• Java-plugins: The Java plugin includes a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) into the daemon and can load and execute plugins in Java bytecode. The relevant parts of the API have been exported to Java, so that you can write a wide variety of plugins in Java. More information is available in the collectd-java(5) manual page.
• Python-plugins: The Python plugin includes a Python-interpreter into the daemon which provides the C-interface to Python-modules. This makes it possible to write additions in Python, analogically to the Perl plugin. collectd-python(5) has the juicy details.
• UNIX domain socket: The UnixSock plugin opens a UNIX socket to which you can connect and submit your values or query collected values. For more information, take a look at the collectd-unixsock(5) manual page
• Execute binaries or scripts: Arguably the easiest and least performant solution. The Exec plugin forks a binary or script which acquires the values somehow and writes them to standard output. See collectd-exec(5) for details.
• Java MBean support: With jcollectd there is a pure-Java implementation of the collectd network protocol. This class can be used as an MBean sender, allowing statistics about a Java program to be sent to a collectd server, and as an MBean receiver, to receive (and work with) data sent by a collectd client.

Built to scale

collectd is able to handle any number of hosts, from one to several thousand. This is achieved by utilizing the resources as efficient as possible, e.g. by merging multiple RRD-updates into one update operation (see this in-depth article), merging the biggest possible number of values into each one network packet and so on. The multithreaded layout allows for multiple plugins to be queried simultaneously – without running into problems due to IO-latencies.

SNMP support

The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is in widespread use with various network equipment, for example switches, routers, rack monitoring systems, thermometers, UPSes, and so on. The SNMP plugin provides a generic interface to the SNM-protocol which you can use to query values and dispatch them over collectd's mechanisms, e. g. transmit them to a server instance somewhere else. Since devices one would query using SNMP usually are embedded devices with not very much computing power, you can set the interval in which data is gathered for each host individually. And since it may take a while for a timeout to occur or the device may take a little while to answer a request, the hosts are queried in parallel using multiple threads.

Integration with monitoring solutions

With version 4.3 the concept of notifications and thresholds has been added to collectd. This allows you to send notifications through the daemon and allows for simple threshold checking. However, collectd is not a monitoring solution. We will probably add some features to make the notification system more usable, but at the moment collectd is no match for a sophisticated monitoring solution.

To make it possible to integrate collectd into the popular monitoring solution Nagios, a “check” has been written for that. It's called collectd-nagios(1) and allows you to use Nagios to monitor if certain values have been collected and if they were in an appropriate range.