Roadmap
Description
Life goes on. Which features are planned in future releases? This page is more a list of ideas than a fixed plan for the future, but it may give you an idea where the journey is going. If you want to contribute but don't know what is to be done, simply drop us a short mail and we'll get you started.
This file is not automatically generated and may thus be out of date from time to time. To give you an idea how fresh this information is please take a look at its history.
Implemented features
The following features have been implemented and will be released with the next minor version. You can check out our Git repository to test these features. They can be found in the master branch. Any feedback and bug reports are welcome!
FileCount plugin: IncludeHidden option
An option to the FileCount plugin to include hidden files and directories has been implemented by Vaclav Malek (scippio on IRC). It has been merged to the master branch on December 25th, 2009.
Python plugin: Support for Python 3
Sven has implemented support for Python 3. The code has been merged to the master branch on January 5th, 2010.
cURL-XML plugin
Similar to cURL-JSON plugin but with XML as container format. A patch has been sent to the mailing list by Amit Gupta on November 16th. After some changes, the plugin has been merged to the master branch on January 13th.
Swap plugin
Support for Linux 2.4 ("<2.6") has been added by Lorin Scraba.
Apache plugin
Support for the IdleServers / IdleWorkers value has been added. Thanks to Gary (bug #15).
Write HTTP plugin
The StoreRates option has been added by Paul Sadauskas.
Planned features
The following features are actively being worked upon. They are in various stages of completion and may or may not make it into the next release. They should have a contact (name) associated with them, so people who are interested can contact the person working on a feature. Please don't add email addresses of other people without their permission. If you want to contact a person below, please look for the email address using the mailing list archives.
perfmon output
Dave McLellan is looking into a text output plugin which creates perfmon compatible output (last contact: April 15th, 2009). See also: #output_text_plugin
Library for binary network protocol
Write a library for the binary network protocol, so that external applications have an easier job interfacing with collectd. The new authentication and encryption feature (added in version 4.7) makes this even more desirable. Octo is working on it.
FreeSWITCH plugin
Plugin which connects to FreeSWITCH, a free IP-telephony software, issues commands periodically and parses the returned output. The plugin was originally written by Leon de Rooij and is currently available from the ldr/freeswitch branch.
Match and target for meta data
It'd be nice to match values by the meta data attached to it and to attach or re-set meta data for values. At least something simple (see the MARK match and target in ip_tables) would be nice.
Event infrastructure
Add an EVENT command to the UnixSock plugin. This command can be used to count events, such as page loads and the like. The goal is to make it possible for applications to implement statistics collection with the minimum of overhead. powdahound is looking into it.
NetCmd plugin
The UnixSock plugin is limited to UNIX domain sockets. It'd be great if it was possible to access this infrastructure from remote hosts, for example for receiving values. Some initial code lives in the ff/netcmd branch but isn't ready yet. The idea is basically to take the UnixSock plugin and make it possible to use network sockets, too. Several people have expressed interest in picking that up, but so far no progress has been made. It's safest to keep development cycles short and provide many small patches as soon as possible.
Erlang plugin
octo is working on an Erlang plugin. The plugin implements a C-node which can communicate with Erlang processes using message-passing. The code is available in the ff/erlang branch.
Integrate Pinba plugin
Kayo Ayanami has written a plugin for collectd which receives UDP traffic from Pinba, a profiling extension for PHP. The collectd-pinba plugin is currently available from sourceforge.net. Kayo has expressed willingness to re-license his code to a GPLv2-compatible license (currently it's GPLv3 or later) so we can integrate the plugin into the main collectd package. Last contact on January 22nd, 2010.
InnoDB addon to MySQL plugin
Morten Hanshaugen is working on adding InnoDB statistics to the MySQL plugin. Last contact was on January 27th via email.
AMQP plugin
Sebastien Pahl has written a write plugin which sends values via the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP). It is using librabbitmq to do so. The code is available from the amqp branch on github.
Wishlist / Ideas
The following is a list of ideas we had but so far nobody has stepped up to implement them. Feel free to add your own “cool stuff” :)
RRDtool plugin: Type-specific configuration
This would allow to keep interesting data longer and less interesting data only for a short time. Also seasonal data could be added. It's not reasonable to add seasonal data to all RRD files, because it operates on unconsolidated primary datapoints (thus taking up a lot of disk space) and you can't specify one seasonal period that fits all kinds of data. A discussion of this feature can be found in the mailinglist's archive.
Maybe an option that can be passed to write functions by the Chains mechanism would be a good idea for implementing this.
Distributed setups
Make it possible to have several "servers" with shared storage. When one server dies another one takes its place, so that you don't have gaps in your statistics. This is probably best implemented as a match that matches only those values the host is responsible for. A really simple first step is available in form of the Hashed match as of version 4.9. Adding automatic fail-over would be a nice second step.
A solution for non-shared storage is probably even harder to implement and likely not worth the effort.
This can be done with DRBD together with Linux HA. A lot of solutions based on this thechnologies works very reliable in production environments.
Embed more scripting languages
Parrot is now at version 1.0 and provides a stable API. Thread- and reentrant-safety is not quite there yet, but it may be worth keeping on eye on.
Store to RDBMS
Being able to store values in an RDBMS would be nice. Bob Cotton has put together some SQL for PostgreSQL and a Perl based plugin to store values into it. This could serve as a starting point as a C based plugin with the same SQL backend.
Query wprobe
wprobe is a interface to query/manage wireless links, written by the guys over at OpenWrt.
output_text plugin
Sebastian has suggested a output_text plugin that can write values to arbitrarily formatted (text-)files. See also: #perfmon_output
Apache plugin: Per virtualhost stats
mod_watch gives access to stats like:
domain.com 8190 539056 20965428 4813 4813 0 14.520 0 4286618408 domain2.com 8190 539056 20965428 4813 4813 0 14.520 0 4286618408
Why not to use it?
- Couldn't find a hopepage for this project. Where does it live? Is it still alive? -- octo 21:16, 22 September 2009 (UTC)
HAproxy plugin
HAproxy is a fast and featureful HTTP and TCP proxy. It has a rich status page, with lot of counters for each frontend and backend : http://demo.1wt.eu/ for example.
This plugin would allow collecting all these metrics, per instance. It can parse the CSV version of the page. The page can be protected using HTTP authentication. --Renchap 20:59, 8 December 2009 (UTC)
- Apparently there has already been some discussion on the HAproxy mailing list about this in August 2009: -- octo 14:12, 14 December 2009 (UTC)
- http://www.mail-archive.com/haproxy@formilux.org/msg01014.html
- The author of the plugin, Ryan Schlesinger, was allowed to provide the code of the plugin under an open source license (GPLv2+). More information can be found on the haproxy.rb page.
pf (packetfilter) plugin
pf is a firewall available on OpenBSD and FreeBSD. There are quite a lot of counters which should be available (packets/seconds, octets/seconds, by states, tables, ...). Some munin plugins for reference : pf_bytes, pf
