Wiki

Related sites

The following is a loosely collected list of articles about collectd, projects using collectd, similar projects and other stuff that might be interesting for our users and interested parties. If you have written or found something that should be listed here, or if we made an error, e. g. in the description of a link, please tell us. All links are sorted alphabetically or not at all. In any case the order does not reflect any kind of significance.

Utility programs and projects

• kcollectd (Homepage)
  A X frontend to the RRD files created by collectd. It uses KDE/Qt, hence the name.
• Collectd-web (Homepage)
  Web-based graphing front-end using JavaScript and a modified version of collection 2.
  git://github.com/httpdss/collectd-web.git
• CollectGraph (Homepage)
  Macro for the MoinMoin wiki that displays graphs using RRD files created and filled by collectd.
• EcoStats (Homepage)
  Web-based, near-realtime statistics display by Sergiusz Pawłowicz, using tables and numerical values that are updated without page reload using JavaScript, a CGI script and the unixsock plugin. When moving your mouse over a value, a floating graph is loaded and displayed. A live sample is available.
• Heymon (Homepage)
  Web-based Ruby on Rails application for graphing RRD files created by collectd.
  git://github.com/newobj/heymon.git
• Visage (Homepage)
  Web-based graphing frontend for RRD-files written by collectd. The data is exported via JSON and graphed in the web browser using Raphaël. There's a short introduction of Visage in Lindsay's blog.
  git://github.com/auxesis/visage.git
• Module for Puppet
  Puppet, a configuration management solution, can manage collectd's configuration files, thanks to funding by neoTactics. The source code is available from:
  git://github.com/DavidS/module-collectd.git
• ruby-collectd
  A Ruby implementation of the collectd network protocol, written by Astro. This allows to send statistics from a Ruby script with a native interface. The source code is available from:
  git://github.com/astro/ruby-collectd.git
• erlang-collectd
  An Erlang implementation of the collectd network protocol, written by Astro. This allows to send statistics from an Erlang application to a collectd server. The source code is available from:
  git://github.com/astro/erlang-collectd.git
• jcollectd
  A pure-Java implementation of the collectd network protocol, written by Doug MacEachern of Hyperic, Inc. It can be used as an MBean sender, sending information about a running Java application to a collectd server, and as an MBean receiver, receiving data sent by an collectd client.
  The source code is available from:
  git://github.com/hyperic/jcollectd.git
• Reconnoiter
  A distributed monitoring system marrying fault detection and trending. It features a collectd module which can be used to monitor the existence of a collectd client on the monitored host.

Articles / Blog entries

• An unknown author at neoTactics is happy about collectd in general and jcollectd in particular in “Hyperic Clued on Cloud Monitoring”.
• John M. Willis has mentioned collectd as one of the “Best Monitoring Tools in the Clouds” in his “2008 Cloudies Awards” blog entry.
• The german Linux-Magazin has written a short report about our stay at the SYSTEMS 2008 (in german).
• Ben Martin has written an article about projects for collecting system statistics published on linux.com. Among other projects it mentions collectd.
• Jeff Waugh is happy about collectd on Ubuntu 8.04.
  Later, he wrote a blog entry which demonstrates how the data collected by collectd can be used to optimize a web-server setup.
  He also demonstrates how to monitor FastCGI using the Tail plugin.
• Terry Gliedt uses collectd to monitor a cluster at University of Michigan.
• Astro has written an introductory article about collectd on the Superfeedr blog.
• Jordan Sissel has included collectd in his sysadmin advent calendar, sysadvent, 2009.

Projects using collectd

• oVirt is a management console for virtual guest systems, including statistics. It's developed by RedHat's Emerging Technologies group.
• LuCI, a web-based configuration frontend for embedded devices, can display statistics collected by collectd. There is a screenshot of the statistics in OpenWrt, which uses LuCI as its web-frontend.

Other users of collectd

• RightScale Inc. use collectd on Amazon EC2 nodes.
• The BBC is collecting statistics from more than 200 servers.
• noris network AG collects performance data from own and hosted servers as well as a wide variety of network equipment using the SNMP plugin.
• neoTactics use collectd in their cloud management framework CloudScale. They have sponsored the development of a module which allows configuring collectd with Puppet, a configuration management solution. See the announcements in neoTactics' blog and on the puppet-users mailing list. Thanks :)

Similar projects

The following is a list of projects similar to collectd and a short note on how they differ from collectd. Projects that focus on monitoring and do some performance measurement on the side are not on this list. It's easy to find extensive lists of such (monitoring) tools on the web, though.

• Ganglia
  Focus on compute clusters and basic system statistics.
• Munin
  Data is collected by forking / executing plugins (i. e. scripts).
• eLuna Graph System
  Written in Perl; relies on cron; local system only.
• Monitorix
  Written in Perl; network support using HTTP (web server and CGI on client).
• openSSI webView
  Specialized solution for openSSI clusters; written in Perl.
• RRDutil
  Written in Perl, relies on cron and SNMP.
• collectl
  Written in Perl; monolithic structure; designed for realtime viewing in the console.