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Collectd unofficial reference

Unofficial site

This site is not directly affiliated with the collectd project. I offer it as a way to navigate collectd's existing documentation more easily; the authoritative sources remain the collectd repository and its wiki.

collectd is a daemon that collects system and application performance metrics and passes them on to storage back-ends, monitoring systems and message brokers. It does the collecting; something else does the graphing and alerting.

This site documents collectd 5.12.0, released 2020-09-03.

Start here

  • First steps — install collectd, enable a couple of plugins, and confirm that values are being written.

  • All 167 plugins — one page per plugin, each with its dependencies, its caveats and its configuration options.

  • collectd.conf(5) — the complete configuration reference, section by section.

  • Concepts — data sets, value lists, the naming schema and the global cache: the model everything else is built on.

How this site is put together

collectd's documentation is spread across three places: the manual pages in the source tree, the GitHub wiki, and collectd.org. They overlap, they disagree, and the wiki links to a great deal that no longer exists.

Everything here is generated from the first two, pinned to the 5.12.0 release:

  • Configuration options come from src/collectd.conf.pod, the source of the collectd.conf(5) manual page. Each plugin's section is extracted once and then shown in two places — on the plugin's own page, and in the full configuration reference. They are the same file, so they cannot drift apart.

  • Descriptions, dependencies, caveats and examples come from the wiki, with its links rewritten to point into this site. Meeting minutes, release notes and pages about plugins that no longer ship are left out.

The about page has the details, and the link report lists every wiki reference that could not be salvaged.