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Monitoring with collectd 4.3
The Collector
Collectd [1] is a familiar site on Linux and Unix systems. The collectd developers bill the tool as "the system statistics collection daemon," which means it is like many other system monitoring tools that inhabit the network. Still, the simplicity, versatility, and portability of collectd make it the tool of choice for many environments.
For many users, the really impressive feature of collectd is its design and pervasive modularity. Everything that is available in terms of monitoring functionality comes exclusively from plugins that the collectd core just loads. Collectd is written in C and contains practically no code that would be specific to any single operating system, so it can operate on almost any Unix-style system. Additionally, it is extremely frugal: Because this tool requires very few resources, it also runs on minimal hardware like the good old Linksys WRT54G or a Raspberry Pi.
The goal of collectd is simply to gather statistics about the system and store the information. Florian Forster published the first versions of collectd [1] in 2005, and his work has been continued and extended by an enthusiastic FOSS community ever since.
Installation
Although versions of collectd run in many different environments, in everyday life, admins who rely on collectd for their monitoring needs are more likely to deploy classic server hardware on Linux. A commercial box is perfectly adequate and, no matter which Linux distribution it runs, collectd is ready in almost no time. Debian-based distributions include collectd as a package, and if you feel more at home on CentOS- or RHEL-based systems, you will find precompiled packages of the current version of collectd on the web.
Collectd, which is very easy to install, works on a simple client-server principle (
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