Table of Contents

Introduction

collectd collects the system and application performance metrics. It has hundreds of Plugins. The latest stable release of Collectd 5.9.2 released on 1st of October 2019 and licenced under MIT License & GNU General Public.

We are going to install collected monitoring on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. The below steps work well with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS as well. If you looking to install collectd on CentOS 7 or 8 the required steps are included as well.

By default, Ubuntu repository provides collectd packages. However, to install the same on CentOS required to enable with EPEL repository. Let’s enable the repo.

Install the EPEL repo by running yum command.

# yum install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-8.noarch.rpm

Installing Packages

To begin with, the installation installs the required dependencies with collectd package. This included few of dependencies support for Perl as well.

# apt install collectd python build-essential librrds-perl libjson-perl libhtml-parser-perl apache2 emboss bioperl ncbi-blast+ gzip libjson-perl libtext-csv-perl libfile-slurp-perl liblwp-protocol-https-perl libwww-perl git libconfig-general-perl libregexp-common-perl

Installing on CentOS 7/8

# yum install collectd
# yum install rrdtool rrdtool-perl perl-HTML-Parser perl-JSON

If you are looking for quick up and running solution use docker to pull the images from

https://hub.docker.com/r/puckel/docker-collectd

This won’t take more than 5 minutes.

Enable the Web module

Enable the Apache modules.

# a2enmod cgi cgid

root@collectd:~# a2enmod cgi cgid
Your MPM seems to be threaded. Selecting cgid instead of cgi.
Enabling module cgid.
Module cgid already enabled
To activate the new configuration, you need to run:
  systemctl restart apache2
root@collectd:~#

Installing Perl Modules

This two Perl module installation will take a bit of time. Don’t interrupt the process once it started.

# cpan jSON
# cpan CGI

Enable CGI support for collectd

Edit the default web configuration and append with CGI support.

# vim /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf

<Directory /var/www/html/collectd-web/cgi-bin>
Options Indexes ExecCGI
AllowOverride All
AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
Require all granted
</Directory>

Apache configuration

Edit the default apache configuration and enable the port.

# vim /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

By default it will be enabled, look at the line number 150.

Include ports.conf

Let’s enable collectd to listen on all interface, edit the configuration

# vim /etc/apache2/ports.conf

Keep the existing config and append with below.

Listen 0.0.0.0:80

To make the changes restart the Apache service.

# systemctl restart apache2

Configuring Collectd

To make few changes on collectd.conf edit the configuration and made the changes.

# vim /etc/collectd/collectd.conf

Uncomment plugin for network

LoadPlugin network

By following under network plugin section, uncomment the server section and replace 127.0.0.1 to 0.0.0.0.

<Plugin network>
        # server setup:
        Listen "0.0.0.0" "25826"
</Plugin>

Look for plugin and uncomment the plugins needed.

Enable Web Interface

During the package installation, we have completed with installing git as well. Clone the git repo to start with configuring the web.

# git clone https://github.com/httpdss/collectd-web.git

Navigate to the cloned repo under

# cd collectd-web/cgi-bin/

Enable the execution permission on graphdefs.cgi.

# chmod +x graphdefs.cgi

Once done, navigate one step backwards to the main directory under the downloaded repo, and edit the python script.

# cd ..
# vim runserver.py

Replace 127.0.0.1 to 0.0.0.0 in below line.

httpd = BaseHTTPServer.HTTPServer(("127.0.0.1", PORT), Handler)

After changing, it should be look like below

httpd = BaseHTTPServer.HTTPServer(("0.0.0.0", PORT), Handler)

It’s time to run the python script to start in background.

./runserver.py &

Incase, if you required to stop the service kill the service using

# killall python

Accessing Web UI of Collectd

Once we start the collectd web python script we are ready to access the web interface.

http://192.168.0.31:8888/

Let’s start to add one more client machine.

Client Setup

Let’s add a Ubuntu Client to collectd server. Install the dependencies and required packages for the client.

# apt install collectd python build-essential librrds-perl libjson-perl libhtml-parser-perl apache2

Installing client packages on CentOS 7/8

# yum install collectd rrdtool rrdtool-perl perl-HTML-Parser perl-JSON -y

[root@prod-srv-02 ~]# yum install collectd rrdtool rrdtool-perl perl-HTML-Parser perl-JSON -y
Last metadata expiration check: 0:41:12 ago on Sat 23 May 2020 06:16:03 PM +04.
Package collectd-5.9.0-5.el8.x86_64 is already installed.
Package rrdtool-1.7.0-16.el8.x86_64 is already installed.
Package rrdtool-perl-1.7.0-16.el8.x86_64 is already installed.
Package perl-HTML-Parser-3.72-14.el8.x86_64 is already installed.
Package perl-JSON-2.97.001-2.el8.noarch is already installed.
Dependencies resolved.
Nothing to do.
Complete!
[root@prod-srv-02 ~]#

Modifying Configuration

Edit the configuration of collectd on client system.

# vim /etc/collectd.conf

Below are the changes required in client side.

Hostname    "prod-srv-02.linuxsysadmins.local"
FQDNLookup   true
LoadPlugin syslog

<Plugin syslog>
        LogLevel info
</Plugin>

Enable the required plugins by removing “#”.

LoadPlugin cpu
LoadPlugin interface
LoadPlugin load
LoadPlugin memory
LoadPlugin network

Enter the collectd server IP under network plugin and enable all other required plugins.

<Plugin network>
        # client setup:
        Server "192.168.0.31" "25826"
        <Server "192.168.0.31" "25826">
        </Server>
</Plugin>

<Plugin load>
        ReportRelative true
</Plugin>

<Plugin memory>
        ValuesAbsolute true
        ValuesPercentage false
</Plugin>

Starting the Client Service

Finally, enable and start the service.

# systemctl start collectd
# systemctl enable collectd

Once service started on client system, switch back to collectd server and reload the interface. Now we should get the newly added client in the list.

That’s it, we have successfully installed and configure collectd monitoring server on Ubuntu and CentOS servers.

Conclusion

To up and run with an OpenSource monitoring tool we can use collectd which collects the system and application performance metrics from remote serves and start to monitor from a centralized monitoring server. Subscribe to the newsletter for more monitoring guides.

jos on How to Configure Sudo email alertMarch 4, 2022
Hi! Some way to send commands write as root by email? Thanks!
paul on Monitoring Proxmox with InfluxDB and Grafana in 4 Easy stepsMarch 1, 2022
Tried 12966 per your example, got error "failed to import dashboard."
Anonymous on Migrate existing Iptables to Nftables in RHEL8/CentOSFebruary 27, 2022
I followed the procedures and successfully loaded some weird 8081 port configurations needed for the app, however I discovered it…
sy on Install Ansible AWX on Kubernetes in 5 minutesFebruary 17, 2022
tried many times - followed all steps but was unable to setup custom context I always get -> The connection…
Faraz Ahmed on Prometheus with Grafana for Linux server monitoring in 5 easy stepsFebruary 7, 2022
Hello Babin Lonston, Your tutorial is very helpful to me to Install the prometheus and nodeexporter on the server. Can…