System performance statistics over collectd

collectd (https://collectd.org/) is a very stable and proven technology to gather system information. collectd provides a bunch of plugins (https://collectd.org/wiki/index.php/Table_of_Plugins) to gather information. 

Requirements

• Root rights to install collectd
• *nix system
• Connection to the longterm storage is possible - default port is 8096

Configuration

This section describes how you setup collectd and send the data to our longterm storage.

1. Installation of collectd
   collectd is often provided by the package manager of *nix based systems. If your system is not supported, please find collectd at their homepage at https://collectd.org/download.shtml. For windows-based servers you might want to look at http://ssc-serv.com/ (which supports collectd, but is commercial). Please understand that this description is for the *nix based setup with collectd. Please contact us for question to windows directly.
   
   
2. Allow that data collection within the longterm data storage
   Please verify that you configured the long term data storage to receive data from our collectd Host Integration. For a detailed explanation please see Allow data collection with inspectIT collectd Integration
   
   

3. Configure to send the data to the longterm storage

   1. Please find the file /etc/collectd.conf and configure the section accordingly:

      Hostname    "inspectIT-collectd"
      #FQDNLookup   true
      BaseDir     "/var/lib/collectd"
      PIDFile     "/var/run/collectd.pid"
      PluginDir   "/usr/lib64/collectd"
      TypesDB     "/usr/share/collectd/types.db"

   2. Scroll down to the LoadPlugin section and uncomment the LoadPlugin network and LoadPlugin uptime lines (that is remove the # at the beginning of the line)

   3. Scroll down to the Plugin Configuration setting. Now we need to specify where the data should be send. Please add the new network plugin here accordingly:

      
      

      . . .
      ##############################################################################
      # Plugin configuration                                                       #
      #----------------------------------------------------------------------------#
      # In this section configuration stubs for each plugin are provided. A desc-  #
      # ription of those options is available in the collectd.conf(5) manual page. #
      ##############################################################################
      
       <Plugin network>
        Server "127.0.0.1" "8096"
       </Plugin>
      
      #<Plugin "aggregation">
      . . .

Verify configuration

To verify the configuration please execute 

sudo /usr/sbin/collectd -t

If no errors are present this command will return with no output. Else you get a detailed explanation of the errors. Please note that this test is just verifying that the configuration on the collectd daemon is correct. It does not actually test the path to the longterm storage.

Startup

You can start the daemon by running sudo service collectd start