Collectd Revision as of Sunday, 20 December 2015 at 19:56 UTC

Amazing little thing that collects data on interfaces, processes,
daemons and tons of other stuff on your system. You can even centralize
log collection! Some details on this install log:

Installation

 yum install collectd collectd-apache collectd-rrdtool

Problem:

 collectd-4.10.0-4.el5.i386 from epel has depsolving problems
   --> Missing Dependency: libpython2.4.so.1.0 is needed by package collectd-4.10.0-4.el5.i386 (epel)
 Error: Missing Dependency: libpython2.4.so.1.0 is needed by package collectd-4.10.0-4.el5.i386 (epel)

This file, however, exists:

 [root@support other_scripts]# locate libpython2.4.so.1.0
 /usr/lib64/libpython2.4.so.1.0

The issue is that the 64-bit repo has both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.
So you need to be a little more explicit:

   yum install collectd.x86_64 collectd-apache collectd-rrdtool

Done!

Configuration

Make a copy and edit the config file /etc/collectd.conf:

 cp /etc/collectd.conf /etc/collectd.conf.original

Add the following for base config that will monitor CPU, Interface, Load
and Memory:

 Hostname    "support.eng.uiowa.edu"
 FQDNLookup   true
 BaseDir     "/var/lib/collectd"
 PIDFile     "/var/run/collectd.pid"
 PluginDir   "/usr/lib64/collectd"
 TypesDB     "/usr/share/collectd/types.db"
 Interval     10  
 ReadThreads  5

This is bloody important: Observe the lib64 in the PluginDir
above for 64-bit installs. I wasted 2 hours of my life wondering why the
damn thing didn’t work and started blaming the packagers.

At the bottom of the file, add this:

 include "/etc/collectd.d/*.conf"

This basically keeps things organized and modular w.r.t. new plugins
(all of which can be defined in collectd.conf itself).

Now start the service and watch as
/var/lib/collectd/support.eng.uiowa.edu gets populated.

Plugin Management

Overview

Plugins are basically .so files (or executable code) which are used by
the collectd daemon if the are enabled. They are configured
individually via XML-style directives in either collectd.conf or in
/etc/collectd.d (see below).

Using existing plugins

Just uncomment the corresponding LoadPlugin in /etc/collectd.conf
and restart the service!

Adding new plugins

Like the config file mentions, there are a few plugins which you will
have to install manually. For example, I’m interested in the Apache and
RRDtool plugins. These are not bundled with collectd by default, but
are available via yum:

 yum install collectd-apache collectd-rrdtool

They install shared object files in /usr/lib64/collectd (on a 64-bit
system) and a config file in /etc/collectd.d.

The upshot is that they include LoadPlugin directives, so don’t touch
the collectd.conf file to enable them. Remember the include
directive we added above.

Configuring Plugins

Read the man page for collectd.conf or the documentation on the
plugin’s website.

Graphing

You would use rrdtool for this. It deserves its own Wiki article(s).
But for instant gratification, install the collectd-web package:

 yum -y install collectd-web

This installs a bunch of CGI scripts in
/usr/share/collectd/collection3. You can now move them to your Apache
cgi-bin to run them

 cp -rv /usr/share/collectd/collection3 /var/www/cgi-bin/
 chmod -R 755 /var/www/cgi-bin/collection3/bin

If you’ve configured Apache properly, you can now navigate to
http://hostname/cgi-bin/collection3/bin/index.cgi and enjoy your
graphs! Remember that you can still do a ton of amazing graph-related
things with rrdtool

Sources

Category:Installation Logs
Category:Nikhil’s Notes
Category:From a past sysadmin
life